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The American Prospect - articles by authorenBeto O'Rourke and the Unity Problemhttps://prospect.org/article/beto-orourke-and-unity-problem
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<p>Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke greets employees during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse &amp; Drinkery in Burlington, Iowa. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554"><span class="dropcap">J</span>ust six months ago, Beto O'Rourke was basking in the love of Democrats from across America as he ran for Senate. Videos of him answering questions and giving speeches went viral, he </span><a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/how-beto-built-his-texas-sized-grassroots-machine/">built</a> an enormous grassroots organizing machine, and hopeful supporters showered him with a mind-boggling $79 million in <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00033540">contributions</a>.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">Even though he lost that race, his thoughts inevitably turned to the White House. And why not? He could run for Texas' other Senate seat, but the result might be the same. People keep comparing him to Barack Obama, who was also 46 when he launched his presidential run in 2007. As Obama demonstrated, if you have talent and good timing, anything is possible. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">But there's a way in which O'Rourke may be too much like Obama, specifically the Obama of 2008. Because it isn't 2008 anymore. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">We have to be honest and say that as appealing as O'Rourke is, he doesn't quite deserve the comparison. Obama became a national figure with a speech at the 2004 Democratic convention that was so dramatic it made pretty much everyone who saw it say, "Holy cow, that guy is going to be president one day." In fact, he had been generating reactions like that for much of his life, even at a place like Harvard Law School, where half of every incoming class thinks they'll be president one day. Despite everything arrayed against him, including an extraordinary volume of racism, he won two presidential elections with a majority of the vote, something no one since Ronald Reagan had done.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">Until 2018, Beto O'Rourke was an undistinguished congressman, and though he ran a terrific Senate campaign, a good portion of the attention and enthusiasm he generated could be attributed less to the fact that he was running such a strong campaign and more to the fact that he was doing it against the odious Ted Cruz. When a software developer in California or a teacher in Massachusetts sent him $50, was it because they had fallen in love with O'Rourke or because the thought of Cruz being defeated was so delicious?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">Probably both. <span class="pullquote-right">But as it became clear he'd run for the White House, O'Rourke learned that when you step up to the big leagues it's a whole other game. </span>He was subjected to a rapid wave of stories examining some less than inspiring parts of his past, like his early support </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/beto-orourkes-political-career-drew-on-donations-from-the-pro-republican-business-establishment/2019/03/14/4dc299e8-3e8a-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html">from developers</a> or even <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/15/orourke-not-proud-writing-1223903">violent fiction</a> he wrote as a teenager. He had to answer questions about his voting record as a congressman, which is <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18150359/beto-orourke-voting-record">more centrist</a> than that of many Democrats. Ted Cruz didn't accuse him of not being liberal enough.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">In an atmosphere were voters will be thinking a lot about questions about ideology, O'Rourke doesn't look too comfortable with the question. Asked if he's a progressive, O'Rourke </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/14/beto-orourke-progressive-democrat-1065590">replied</a>, "I don't know. I'm just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I'm not big on labels. I don't get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I'm for everyone."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">The impulse O'Rourke has to fall back on the rhetoric of unity seems perfectly sincere, but it can also sound like something Democrats have grown awfully suspicious of. When Obama ran 12 years ago talking about bringing all Americans together to accomplish great things, it could still inspire hope, even if George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had said the same thing when they ran. But Obama ran into a Republican Party that wasn't interested in accomplishing great things; the only thing they wanted to accomplish was defeating him. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">There was no better example than the Affordable Care Act. Obama spent a year cajoling, imploring, and pleading with Republicans to join him in a compromise, under the mistaken theory that with enough facts and logic he could persuade at least some of them to put aside partisanship and try to solve the problems of the American health care system. In the end, the ACA got zero Republican votes in either house of Congress, and the moment it passed they began strategizing on how to destroy it. The rest of his term went pretty much the same way, culminating in Mitch McConnell's refusal to allow Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote, to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. And the entire party went along.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">Then Republicans made the most hateful, ignorant bigot they could find their presidential nominee, and the entire party lined up behind him. Anyone who thinks the next Democratic president will get any support from congressional Republicans for any important legislative agenda item is either not being honest, or they're simply a fool. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">Does O'Rourke believe it? It's hard to know for sure. As I've </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/04/john-hickenloopers-entry-reveals-how-moderates-fatally-misunderstand-todays-gop">argued elsewhere</a>, if you talk to enough ordinary voters you can become convinced that what they want is for Washington to stop all the squabbling and come together to tackle the nation's challenges, and if that's what the public wants, shouldn't it be possible? The problem is that today's Republican Party is not only not interested, they're unalterably committed to thwarting Democrats no matter what damage is done in the process. Which presents a critical question to any Democrat running for president: How are you going to handle that?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">The truth is that none of the candidates yet have a satisfying answer to that question. But the we-can-all-get-along perspective that O'Rourke and some others like </span><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/colorado-gov-john-hickenlooper-touting-diverse-background-joins/story?id=61416924">John Hickenlooper</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/10/politics/cory-booker-iowa-love-unity/index.html">Cory Booker</a> are bringing looks particularly naïve given what we've been through over the last decade.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">I don't think it's an accident that O'Rourke has also been pretty vague so far on the key policy questions like health care and climate change (though in fairness, he's not the only one). As soon as you put out a specific plan to address one of those problems, some people won't like it and "unity" looks a lot harder. O'Rourke seems less committed to a particular policy agenda than to a gauzy vision of a brighter future built on common purpose. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">That's not to say O'Rourke doesn't have a lot going for him. He's charismatic in a way that manages to be thoughtful and enthusiastic. He based his 2018 campaign in organization and mobilization, which is what the Democratic nominee will have to do. When he takes a liberal position on an issue he does it without apology or fear, which is a contrast to many Democrats of the past. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-a2d41b0f-7fff-d767-87d9-b9203135b554">But to become the Democratic nominee, he's going to have to do some things he hasn't done before, including articulating a vision for the hard work of governing based in the realities he'll confront if he actually becomes president. He's not alone in failing to fully grapple with that challenge; we'll see who among the Democrats can meet it.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:41:12 +0000232466 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhat the Presidential Candidates Aren't Telling You About Medicare For Allhttps://prospect.org/article/what-presidential-candidates-arent-telling-you-about-medicare-all
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<p>Senator Bernie Sanders approaches a podium during a campaign stop in Concord, New Hampshire. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hile the essential positions of the two major parties on issues don't change much, every once in a while a party will have to decide not just what it believes in on a particular subject, but exactly what it wants to do about it when it takes power. The more complex the issue is, the longer that process can take. Right now, Democrats are debating where they should go on health care—one of the most critical and knotty policy challenges that exists—but they're doing it faster than they've ever had to before, even as the solutions they're moving toward are more ambitious than anything the party has previously embraced. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">In the process, they may be gliding past one of the most critical questions they'll face if they actually get the chance to pass Medicare For All, or whatever it will ultimately be called: not just which policy would be preferable if it became law, but how they can get it to </span><em>become </em>law. A bunch of politicians aren't demonstrating that they've thought through the politics of what they're committing themselves to.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">To understand what I mean we have to go over a bit of health care history, beginning with the failure of the Clinton health care plan in 1994, an effort that was overseen by Hillary Clinton. Although many people now think of both Clintons as timid incrementalists, their plan was sweeping, disruptive, and difficult to explain—though in many ways it resembled the Affordable Care Act that Barack Obama would pass in 2010. Most of all, it engendered not only united opposition from Republicans but furious pushback from insurers and others in the health care industry, who </span><a href="https://youtu.be/Dt31nhleeCg">aired ads</a> featuring a middle-class couple ("Harry and Louise") worried that they'd lose what health security they had if the law were passed. A year after it was introduced, the bill was withdrawn without ever coming to a vote (the <em>Prospect</em>'s Paul Starr, who worked on the effort in the Clinton administration, <a href="https://prospect.org/article/what-happened-health-care-reform">tells the story of its failure here</a>).</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">It's the next part of the history that's critical to our story. After the Clinton plan was withdrawn, Democrats went back to the drawing board, spending the next </span>decade and a half thinking both about health care policy and about health-care politics. This was a debate that took place among policy wonks, political professionals, and elected officials, playing out over those years both in private and in public.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">So by the time we reached the 2008 election, the health-care plans offered by all three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards—were remarkably similar. There were differences in the details, but they all embraced an expansion of government health coverage, subsidies for people with low or moderate incomes, and increased government regulation of insurance.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">It wasn't because the three had some kind of personal mind-meld. They were all reflecting the consensus that had emerged within the party, that this was the path for Democrats to follow on health-care reform. And one of the core pieces of that consensus was that avoiding another "Harry and Louise" debacle was critical. In order to get reform passed, you couldn't just fight the nearly infinite resources of the insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and doctors, because if you tried, you'd lose. You had to co-opt them, convince them to support the Democratic reform, or at least not fight too hard against it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Which was a key part of the year-long effort to assemble the ACA after Obama took office. His administration worked to win over insurers, for instance, by offering them a bargain: If you accept greater regulation, you'll get more customers as we bring private insurance to millions of people who don't have it. While there were moments when the insurers looked ready to abandon the ACA, in the end they stayed on board and the law passed without a single vote to spare in the Senate.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811"><span class="pullquote-right">Whatever you might think about the ACA, that 15-year process did what it was supposed to</span>: It arrived at a policy solution the party could live with, and it successfully dealt with the opposition so that the bill could be passed.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Now let's fast-forward to today. Democrats are going through the same process, but it's one that really only began once they moved from defending the ACA against legal and legislative attacks to debating the next phase of Democratic reform. The last major event in the defense of the ACA was the defeat of the Republican attempt to repeal it, which happened in July 2017, less than two years ago. There were 14 years between the defeat of the Clinton plan and the 2008 election; there will have been just over three years between the defeat of GOP efforts to repeal the ACA and the 2020 election. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">But since 2017, Democrats have been talking about health-care </span><em>policy </em>to the almost total exclusion of health-care <em>politics</em>.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">In that discussion you can see how the successful ACA traumatized Democrats just as surely as the failure of the Clinton plan did. They worked so hard, fought against a torrent of Republican misinformation ("Death panels!"), spent untold effort explaining an intricate law that left most voters puzzled, and had to defend it from one ridiculous lawsuit after another—and it was a law they weren't all that crazy about in the first place. Ask any Democrat what they think of the ACA, and they'll respond wearily, "Look, I know it's not perfect, but it did a lot of good." </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Shaped by that experience, many if not most Democrats are done with trying to compromise with Republicans or support half-measures. They want universal coverage and they aren't going to settle for anything less. So single-payer plans like those offered by Bernie Sanders and </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/26/18239630/medicare-for-all-pramila-jayapal-bill">Representative Pramila Jayapal</a> are being taken more seriously than ever, and nearly every Democratic presidential candidate says they support "Medicare For All," even if that has become a squishy term that can mean many things, including systems that would maintain a role for private insurance and where enrollment in a government plan is voluntary.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Eventually, every presidential candidate will have to put forward a detailed plan. Once again, the differences between them are likely to be real but small, or at least they'll be able to fit into one of two camps: single-payer plans like Sanders's, and others that allow any American to join a government insurer if they choose, whether it's Medicare, Medicaid, or something new. All will represent a profound change in the American health care system.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">If, that is, they can pass Congress. And that's the thing none of the candidates are really talking about. If we're going to sharply reduce or even eliminate the role of private insurers, they are not going to be co-opted. If we're going to rein in soaring drug costs, the drug companies will not agree. If we're going to control prices, which is the real key to bringing down the absurd amounts we pay for health care, doctors and hospitals will not go along. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">So how is this going to work? Democrats have a chance to win control of the Senate in 2020, but they won't get 60 votes. So can they pass a health care overhaul through reconciliation, or are they going to have to eliminate the filibuster?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Even if they do that, it could be a longshot. When the hospital industry's lobbyists tell your member of Congress that the local hospital—the biggest employer in her district—will go out of business if Medicare For All is passed (regardless of whether that's true), will she still be willing to vote for it?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">Those kinds of questions are hard to answer, but so far the presidential candidates have barely even tried. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising; candidates usually claim that things are going to be easier than they turn out to be. They know that voters aren't exactly eager to hear a candidate say, "Here's the great future I'm promising you, but to be honest, odds are against us getting it through Congress." </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-07d86298-7fff-c649-51fe-62cb00600811">So it's entirely possible that we'll get to November 2020 with a newly elected Democratic president who promised a radical overhaul of the American health-care system but never grappled with the intense opposition such an effort is going to encounter and how it might be overcome. I sure hope they're thinking about it in private, and they have some idea of how to get it done.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 10 Mar 2019 23:17:35 +0000232416 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhy Republican Cries of 'Socialism!' Won't Workhttps://prospect.org/article/why-republican-cries-socialism-wont-work
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<p>Senator Bernie Sanders speaks as he kicks off his 2020 presidential campaign at Navy Pier in Chicago. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0"><span class="dropcap">I</span>n his patented stepdad-telling-you-this-is-for-your-own-good style, Mike Pence </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pence-likens-democratic-health-care-and-energy-agenda-to-socialism/2019/03/01/5e522bfe-3c30-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html">came to warn</a> the attendees at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference that their already boundless hatred for Democrats doesn't quite match the evil the opposition party now represents. "Under the guise of 'Medicare for All' and a 'Green New Deal,' Democrats are embracing the same tired economic theories that have impoverished nations and stifled the liberties of millions over the past century," Pence told them. "That system is socialism."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">Meanwhile, a related narrative is taking hold in a media that finally got over its need to write the 10,000th "In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Still Support Trump," story full of breathless reports from Rust Belt diners where middle-aged white men gather to muse on the president's heroic efforts to defend the country from the immigrant horde. Now, the story is "Moderate Democrats Worry About Party's Move Left," (see </span><a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2019-02-23/as-2020-candidates-turn-left-some-democrats-worry-about-the-center">here</a> or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/centrist-democrats-push-back-against-partys-liberal-surge/2019/03/01/a6674430-3c38-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html">here</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/us/politics/2020-democrats-pennsylvania-.html">here</a>), in which reporters find said moderates to insist that all this talk of an ambitious liberal agenda is sure to result in disaster for their party.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">Once again, we're about to find the GOP and the media in agreement: that socialism is bad, that the Democratic Party is moving too far and too fast to the left, and that Republican attacks on socialism will inevitably be effective, perhaps to the point of ensuring Donald Trump's re-election. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">There are a lot of misconceptions and mistaken assumptions here, none more obvious than the idea that what Democrats are proposing has anything to do with whatever communist nightmare Mike Pence fears will lie in America's future. If universal health care is socialist, for instance, then ours is the only advanced democracy on earth that </span><em>isn't </em>socialist, since every other one of our peer countries has it (though the precise form varies, as do Democratic proposals). There's no question that the Democratic Party has moved to the left, but the vast majority of what most of its prominent politicians support now that they didn't a few years ago—universal health coverage, a $15 minimum wage, legalization of marijuana—is extremely popular.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">Of course, saying "My god, our opponents want us to turn into Venezuela!" is a lot more ominous than "My god, our opponents want to turn us into Denmark!" which is far closer to the truth. But either way, it's important not to assume that because Republicans are lobbing an attack at Democrats then that attack must necessarily be working. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">This is one of the dangers of those immersed in politics, whether it's journalists or political professionals: assuming that voters understand all this in the same way you do. But of course, they don't. They neither know or care as much about it, and among other things they don't have strong opinions about ideology. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">Which is one of the reasons that if you're looking for a case where a presidential candidate lost mostly because they were too ideologically extreme, you'd have to go back almost half a century to George McGovern in 1972 (and even that one is debatable). That's not to say it couldn't possibly happen again, but there's an enormous weight of evidence suggesting that even as the parties move apart on issues, ideology has become less important for voters. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">For instance, analyses of congressional elections show that while at one time being a moderate might have enabled you to poach voters from the other party and improve your chances of winning, those days are behind us; once you win your party's primary, you'll do equally well no matter what your ideological profile is. "It doesn't do you any good," Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/25/do-democrats-really-have-worry-about-left-actually-not-so-much">recently told me</a>, "to position yourself in the center in hopes that that's going to attract more votes from the other party. It just doesn't seem to work."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">That truth runs in contrast to the worldview most reporters bring to their coverage of campaigns, which says not only that ideology matters but that appealing to voters in the center is both strategically effective and a moral good. The truth, however, is that there just aren't that many voters in the center anymore. There may be people who tell pollsters that they're "independent," but the vast majority of them actually vote with one party or the other. We saw it in 2016: Hillary Clinton tried desperately to appeal to moderate Republicans, many of whom were sincerely repulsed by their party's nominee, but when the election came those moderate Republicans voted for Donald Trump anyway. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0"><span class="pullquote-right">What matters is party, not ideology. </span>Our party affiliation—built in large part on distaste for the other side—is an identity powerful enough that voting for the other party becomes unthinkable, even if we have reservations about our candidate. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">Which leads to what may be the most important truth of contemporary American elections: Persuasion matters less and less, and mobilization matters more and more. It's nice to win over people who weren't going to vote for you, but what makes the difference is whether you got your people to the polls. The perfect election for your side is one where your voters are excited about your candidate and despise your opponent, and are thus highly motivated, while the other side's voters are indifferent to both of them. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f3827071-7fff-89bd-0385-802f9b7fced0">It's possible that if Republicans cry "Socialism!" enough, their voters will be horrified enough to flock to the polls in numbers greater than they would have otherwise. It's a question worth investigating. But the last thing we should do is just assume it will work.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 03 Mar 2019 22:28:55 +0000232373 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanIt's the Economy, Stupid -- Againhttps://prospect.org/article/its-economy-stupid-again
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5"><span class="dropcap">A</span>s you may remember, when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 someone put up a sign in his campaign headquarters reading, "It's the economy, stupid," reminding the candidate and everyone working for him to keep the focus on that issue. With the country still recovering from the last recession, Clinton framed much of his campaign that year in terms of a conflict between ordinary people on one side and the wealthy on the other, with slogans like "Fighting for the forgotten middle class" and "Putting people first." That's despite the fact that Clinton was a centrist in many ways.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">And of course, it worked. Democrats usually succeed when they wage what Republicans angrily call "class warfare," an objection to both the substance and politics of going after the rich on behalf of the non-rich. It's not surprising, since working so assiduously for the wealthy, as the GOP does, requires some delicate maneuvering. It's best if no one calls too much attention to it. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that Democrats ever run on anything else.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">And in 2020, they may never have had a clearer opportunity, even though the economy is not doing nearly as poorly as it was when Clinton was running. Republicans managed to pass a highly unpopular tax cut in late 2017, which you might have thought would be difficult to do. They certainly thought the tax cut would inevitably be popular. But by relentlessly hammering it as a giveaway to the wealthy and corporations, Democrats fixed the idea in the public mind that it was meant to help those at the top. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">That argument not only reinforced what voters already believed about Republicans, it had the benefit of being true. We already knew that just as Democrats predicted, corporations primarily used their windfalls not to raise worker pay but for </span><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/18/stock-buybacks-hit-a-record-1point1-trillion-and-the-years-not-over.html">record stock buybacks</a>. And now that corporations are reporting their tax information for 2018, the first year the tax cut was in effect, we're seeing just how much they gained. Here are a few representative examples, <a href="https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-7506f22b-7eda-433e-be62-381d382cb589.html">courtesy of <em>Axios</em></a>:</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">GM is claiming a $104 million refund on $11.8 billion in 2018 profit.</span></p>
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</ul><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">In the past, companies have used their armies of accountants, tax lawyers, and lobbyists to navigate and shape the complexities of the tax code to make sure they didn't pay anything at all or even got large refunds. But the new law, which both lowered the nominal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and carved out even more pathways for tax avoidance, made it more likely than ever that corporations will get away with paying nothing.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">But that's not even the most vivid illustration of what the tax bill did. </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/21/trump-tax-law-bank-profits-1203266">According to a new FDIC report</a>, bank profits increased by $72.4 billion last year compared to 2017, with $28.8 billion attributable directly to the tax cut. Turning that into a political spear to thrust at Republicans' hearts is easy. Try this: "A decade ago, Wall Street nearly destroyed the American economy, and the taxpayer stepped up and bailed them out. Then Donald Trump and the Republicans came along and gave them a tax cut worth $28.8 billion dollars in just one year. Does that sound fair to you?" </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5"><span class="pullquote-right">Democrats are already changing the entire political conversation around the economy even capitalism itself. </span>Not only are they proposing significant tax increases on the wealthy, whether it's higher marginal rates or a wealth tax, they're also arguing for a fundamental reorientation of federal policy to get at the roots of inequality. Their proposals include traditional Democratic ideas like raising the minimum wage, along with a broad expansion of social supports in areas like health care and child care, and even some </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/15/democrats-do-have-an-agenda-and-even-some-big-ideas-heres-one-of-them">revision</a> to the nature of the modern corporation to give workers a greater voice.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">Every one of those proposals has wide appeal to voters, and every one gives Republicans the vapors. But let's not forget that in 2016, Donald Trump correctly surmised that despite the fact that unemployment was low and the economy was on a steady path of recovery from the Great Recession, something was fundamentally wrong. The fact that nearly anyone can get a job isn't much to celebrate if the only jobs available where you live are at Walmart or in an Amazon fulfilment center. When Trump told voters that the system was rigged against them, he tapped into a genuine and justifiable desire for something different.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b8b596a4-7fff-4247-b6a4-b449dd8362a5">Of course, what he delivered was more wealth for the wealthy and more powerful for the powerful. If Democrats can't turn that into an effective argument for change, they ought to be in a different business.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 24 Feb 2019 23:13:04 +0000232314 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhy Democrats Need to Save the IRShttps://prospect.org/article/why-democrats-need-save-irs
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab"><span class="dropcap">O</span>f all the supposedly radical ideas newly audacious Democrats have suggested, none may be more broadly popular than raising taxes on the wealthy. In whatever form it might take—raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/4/18168431/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-70-percent">suggested</a>, or instituting a wealth tax as Elizabeth Warren <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/elizabeth-warren-propose-new-wealth-tax-very-rich-americans-economist-says/">proposes</a>, or raising the estate tax as Bernie Sanders <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/31/18205294/bernie-sanders-estate-tax-99-percent">would like</a>, there's almost nothing that would be an easier sell to the public, as polls have shown for years. As a recent <em>Politico</em> <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/04/democrats-taxes-economy-policy-2020-1144874">headline</a> put it, "Soak the rich? Americans say go for it."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">That doesn't mean that the rich themselves, and their representatives in the Republican Party, wouldn't react with horror and fight any such proposals with the teeth-baring fury of a cornered animal. One Fox Business host, upon hearing some of the poll results, </span><a href="https://www.gq.com/story/fox-news-tax-poll-fairness">lamented</a> that "The idea of fairness has been promoted in our schools for a long time," and this has warped the minds of the young toward such abhorrent idea. But should Democrats get the chance—say in 2021 with a newly elected president and a Democratic Congress—there's something else they should do beyond just raising taxes on the rich. And they can even start preparing the ground now.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">I speak of something almost no one talks about, because unlike taxing the rich it doesn't make for a crowd-pleasing chant. Democrats need to revive the Internal Revenue Service.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">I'm guessing you didn't just leap out of your chair, your fist pumping up and down in agreement. But restoring American tax collection is absolutely critical to the long-term progressive project, not to mention the proper functioning of government. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">To understand why you have to grasp the depleted state of the IRS and how it got that way. <span class="pullquote-right">Over the last quarter-century the Republican Party has waged a war on the IRS, a war that has been tremendously successful.</span> And you'll be shocked to learn that its primary beneficiaries have been the wealthy. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">The story begins after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Newt Gingrich and his colleagues decided that pushing to cut tax rates was not enough; they could serve the goal of limiting government by hamstringing the agency charged with collecting taxes. So they held a series of hearings meant to dramatize supposed IRS abuses, with people testifying about the horrors IRS agents had inflicted on them, some appearing behind screens to protect their identity from the presumably vengeful tax man. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">With this picture of an IRS out of control in place, Congress soon passed a reform bill limiting its powers, and the agency's downward slide began. In 2013, Republicans forced a cut to the IRS budget, despite their ever-growing task. Then came the ludicrous "scandal" in which Republicans claimed that Tea Party groups were being targeted for vicious Obama administration harassment through the IRS. In truth, some inadequately trained officials trying to apply vague laws on what sorts of organizations qualify as 501(c)(4) charities were deluged with applications for that status from Tea Party groups dishonestly claiming they weren't primarily political, and in the end the only "harassment" the groups suffered was some delays in being officially granted (c)(4) status (and when your application is pending you're not restricted from doing anything). </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">But the facts didn't matter to the broader goal, which was to discredit the IRS and further prevent it from doing its job. More budget cuts followed, and the result is a tax collection agency that is degraded and demoralized. Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger of <em>ProPublica</em> </span><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted">describe the damage</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">So if you decide to cheat on your taxes, the chances you'll get caught are small and growing smaller all the time, since the IRS audits so few people anymore. Though there's actually one group of Americans who still have good reason to fear an audit: the poor. Someone making $20,000 a year who takes advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit is </span><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-irs-audit-working-poor">twice as likely</a> to be audited as someone making $500,000 a year. That too is partly a result of Republican pressure, to crack down on people who fraudulently claim the EITC.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">But the rest of Americans are learning that cheating on your taxes is something that carries very little risk, which means that more and more people will do it, further starving government of the money it needs to fund the programs progressives would like to put in place. Kiel and Eisinger </span><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted">estimate</a> that $18 billion per year is being lost in taxes that the IRS would have been able to collect had its budget not been cut in recent years.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">Meanwhile, Republicans continue to not just undermine the IRS but to attack the very idea that paying taxes is a patriotic thing to do. Consider their last two presidential nominees. When it was revealed that Mitt Romney moved his money around in an intricately choreographed multinational dance including stops in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, he said he was only doing what any sensible person would do. "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more," Romney </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/looking-out-no">would say</a>. "I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">Think about that for a moment. The Republican nominee for president argued that anyone who doesn't take advantage of every available tax shelter and loophole is such a contemptible fool that they've proven themselves unfit for the presidency.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">And then came Donald Trump. When Hillary Clinton noted that tax returns he had to submit when applying for a casino license showed he had paid no federal taxes over one period of time despite his wealth, he </span><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/26/trump-brags-about-not-paying-taxes-that-makes-me-smart.html">shot back</a>, "That makes me smart." Of course, he refused to make his tax returns public, like every other candidate and president in the last 40 years. And as <em>The New York Times</em> revealed in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html">an exhaustively documented investigation</a> published last October, in the 1990s Trump and his family planned and executed a massive tax fraud scheme that cheated the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">The fact that the president is almost a parody of everything wrong with the system as it is today provides Democrats a way to change the story around the IRS and the tax system in general. The first thing they need to do is obtain his returns from the IRS, as the House Ways and Means Committee has the right to do under current law. While it's entirely possible if not likely that those returns will deepen the Russia scandal and point toward other scandals we aren't even aware of yet, they're also likely to offer a shocking picture of how the wealthy are able to avoid paying their fair share. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">So Trump's returns can be a jumping-off point for a new round of dramatic hearings about tax cheats, with the president and other super-wealthy characters cast as the villains of the story. Then Democrats need to come up with a reform package—including increased funding and the hiring of agents to replace all the ones that have left—to restore the agency so it can do its job. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-865219af-7fff-4cc0-5bbf-8a8233535dab">It's not easy to win sympathy for the IRS, but you don't have to like paying your taxes to understand how important it is that everyone does. As Oliver Wendell Holmes </span><a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/">said</a>, taxes are the price we pay for the privilege of living in a civilized society. But everybody has to pay their fair share, and we can't make that happen—or fund the ambitious plans Democrats have to make our society more civilized—if the IRS doesn't work. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:28:00 +0000232174 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanIs Media Coverage of the 2020 Campaign Repeating the Old Mistakes?https://prospect.org/article/media-coverage-2020-campaign-repeating-old-mistakes
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06"><span class="dropcap">T</span>he race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination is officially on. And it's already not going well.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">I don't mean that as a knock on the candidates, who are an impressive (and large!) collection of officeholders. I'm talking about the way the media cover the race. And heaven help us, they seem to have learned nothing from what happened in 2016.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">Or any year before that, for that matter. All this has me thinking back to the aftermath of the 1988 election, when news organizations decided that they had been manipulated into focusing the discussion on things like Willie Horton instead of more substantive issues. They held panel discussions and wrote essays about what had gone wrong in their coverage, and promised to do better. One of the results was the creation of the "ad watch," in which candidates' TV ads would be dissected to judge if they were accurate and fair. Reporters and editors promised that next time they'd focus less on the horse race and more on what the election would actually mean for Americans' lives.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">Ad watches proliferated in 1992, but eventually became less common. Later on we saw the creation of projects like </span><a href="https://www.politifact.com/">Politifact</a> and <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/">factcheck.org</a>, along with many fact-checkers employed by newspapers, in an attempt to not only correct the record when politicians lie but provide a disincentive to dishonesty. But as a whole, news coverage didn't change all that much: It was still poll-driven, centered on the horse race, and consumed with trivia. "What kind of president would this candidate be?" was a far less important question than "How will this latest gaffe play with voters?"</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">And it still is, despite what any sane person understands was a gigantic media failure in 2016. Faced with a candidate who was more blatantly dishonest than any politician in American history (he'd </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/21/president-trump-made-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-two-years">go on</a> to make 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years in office), had zero relevant experience or understanding of government, had obvious disturbing ties to a foreign adversary, and was quite possibly the most corrupt major business figure in the country, they decided that the topic that required limitless journalist resources, column inches, and air time was the question of … whether Hillary Clinton used the wrong email account.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">It's hard enough to wrap your head around that even today; imagine trying to explain it to your grandchildren decades from now that seasoned journalists decided that there was literally no more important question that the nation confronted. According to </span><a href="https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump.php">one study</a>, "in just six days, <em>The New York Times</em> ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." <em>Times </em>reporter Michael Schmidt recently <a href="https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2019/02/07/692245644/fresh-air-for-feb-7-2019-nyt-reporter-on-trump-mueller-and-russia?showDate=2019-02-07">told</a> NPR's Terry Gross that the paper formed a unit to investigate all the connections between Donald Trump and Russia—<em>after the election was over</em>.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06"><span class="pullquote-right">Yet while there has been plenty of criticism of the 2016 coverage, almost none of the elite players inside the media have said, "We really screwed up, and here's how we think we can do better." </span>Which may be why the coverage of the next presidential race isn't looking too encouraging. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">Let's take, as an illustration, the two candidates who officially entered the race in the last few days, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Warren is offering a candidacy that is both full of policy proposals, many of which she has introduced in recent months, and the one with the most coherent case for her election of any of the contenders. She argues that our system, both political and economic, has been built by and for the ultra-wealthy, and presents a number of radical policy changes—a </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/25/elizabeth-warrens-wealth-tax-idea-couldnt-come-better-time">wealth tax</a>, a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-shouldnt-be-accountable-only-to-shareholders-1534287687">change to corporate board structures</a> to give workers more power—that she says would attack ever-worsening inequality.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">You might think those ideas are good or bad, but they're certainly not the principal focus of coverage of Warren's campaign. Instead, nearly every story you read—no matter whether it's about a speech Warren gave or a proposal she put out—will include discussion of Warren's Native American "issue," i.e. the fact that her parents told her she had Native roots, at times in her life she has identified more or less closely with Native peoples, and recently she took a DNA test to find out whether her genes said it was true.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">To be clear, because I already hear the complaints: Whatever you think about how Warren has handled this issue, can you actually say it has something meaningful to say about the sort of president she'd be? About whether her program really would reduce inequality, or about whether her priorities are the best ones, or about her ability to get legislation passed in Congress, or about how she'd handle a foreign crisis? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">Of course it doesn't. Yet we get consumed with "issues" like that one that seem to exist only within the four corners of the campaign, not because we think they're actually meaningful or revealing but because we assume they'll have an effect on voters. Meanwhile we completely forget that we're trying to figure out who would be the best president. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">As for Klobuchar, before announcing her candidacy she suffered a minor deluge of </span><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amy-klobuchar-abuse-staff-2020_us_5c5a1cb1e4b0871047588649">stories</a> describing poor treatment of her staff, which then led to <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/10/amy-klobuchar-2020-staff-horror-stories-1160780">meta-stories</a> about how the story is hurting her nascent campaign. In this case, at least there's a connection between the identified Achilles's heel and what sort of a president she'd be; it's worth knowing how a politician treats those who work for her, because that could affect how effectively the White House operates. But it's hard to argue that it's the single most important thing to know about Klobuchar.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">But it well might turn out that the press treats it that way. Once these "issues" take hold with reporters, they use them to frame what that candidate does from that point forward. "Still reeling from controversy over her racial identity, Elizabeth Warren announced today." "Trying to refocus attention away from the allegation that she mistreated her staff, Amy Klobuchar traveled to Iowa." Nothing they say or do can change it, yet everything they say or do is described as an attempt to distract from it. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">The project of figuring out who candidates "really" are (as opposed to who they'd like us to think they are) is a perfectly worthy one, and if there's one lesson we should have learned it's that as president they're the same people they were before. Bill Clinton cheated on his wife before he was president, and while he was president. George W. Bush lied a lot about policy while he was a candidate, and did the same as president. Donald Trump was a corrupt liar his whole life, and still is. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-dfa66c9e-7fff-f2ee-881f-4469803c8a06">The key, though, is exploring the connection: Here's who the candidate has been and is now, and this is why it would be important to their presidency. That's the part so many reporters seem to forget about once politicians start trudging through Iowa. But if there's good news, it's this: It's not too late for coverage of the campaign to get better. Those of us in the media just have to decide to do something different.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 10 Feb 2019 23:38:30 +0000232117 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanSorting Through What the Democratic Candidates Really Think About 'Medicare-For-All'https://prospect.org/article/sorting-through-what-democratic-candidates-really-think-about-medicare-all
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen I was 24 years old, with field-grunt positions on a couple of campaigns under my belt, I went to work for a political consulting firm where one of the first things I was taught was that getting too specific about policy was deadly for candidates. The trouble with putting out a bunch of white papers was that the more detailed you got, the easier it would be for voters to find something in your proposals they didn't like. And all it took was one disagreement for a voter to turn away and support another candidate who hadn't said anything they objected to. The safer path was to lay out broad principles on policy without getting too specific.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">It's hard for a presidential candidate to follow that advice, particularly on an issue that the primary electorate cares deeply about. But so far, the Democrats running for president (and those thinking about running who haven't yet pulled the switch) are at the very least keeping their options open on many subjects, especially the one that looks to be the most important policy argument of the 2020 primaries: health care, or more specifically, Medicare-For-All. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">Before we get to what the candidates are saying and will be saying, a word about that descriptor. Not that long ago, when liberals were asked what kind of health system they'd prefer, the words "single-payer" became the most common answer. The problem was that a true single payer system, in which everyone is covered by a government plan and there's little or no role for private insurance, exists in only a few places like Taiwan, while there are many other systems that provide universal coverage but include a role for (closely regulated) private insurers. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">As it became clear that many liberals were open to universal systems that weren't necessarily single-payer, liberals cast about for a different term to describe what they were for. "Universal coverage" might have been a contender, but for some reason it never caught on. Instead, "Medicare-For-All"—capitalizing on the enormous popularity of Medicare—became the thing every Democrat began to say they're for. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">To the dismay of the wonkish or pedantic (or both), Medicare-For-All is now being used to describe a variety of different kinds of systems with significant differences. At this point, though, we may have no choice but to live with it, particularly because it seems so popular among the Democratic presidential candidates who will be at the center of this debate. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">And as far as they're concerned, getting too specific could indeed be dangerous. Kamala Harris, for instance, did a </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/29/politics/harris-private-insurance-medicare/index.html">town hall</a> on CNN last week, and was asked about whether she really supported eliminating private insurance companies. That is what would happen under Bernie Sanders's Medicare-For-All plan, which Harris has cosponsored. She affirmed the idea, describing the difficulties private insurers create and saying "Let's eliminate all that, let's move on." But <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/29/politics/kamala-harris-medicare-for-all-eliminate-private-insurers-backlash/index.html">within a day</a>, her aides were telling the press that Harris is open to multiple paths to reform, even if she still preferred true Medicare-For-All.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">That's probably why Harris is a cosponsor not just of Bernie's plan, but also of </span><a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1970/cosponsors">this plan</a> and <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2708/cosponsors">this plan</a> and <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2001/cosponsors">this plan</a>, all of which try to expand coverage through the government in different ways without eliminating private insurance. She may be hedging her bets, but it also appears that she's been happy to sign on to any proposal that sounds better than what we have now.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, all four of the senators currently running for president—Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand—</span><a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1804/cosponsors">cosponsored</a> Bernie Sanders's bill, but none of them seems to look at it the way Bernie himself does, that eliminating private insurance is the only solution to our health-care problems and anything else would be inadequate.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">Unfortunately, that means that when someone says "Medicare-For-All," it's hard to know precisely what they mean. At a minimum they may mean that they want any American to at least have the option to join Medicare, or another government insurance plan, if that's what they'd prefer. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">That question of choice is absolutely essential to this debate, both substantively and politically. Allowing people (or businesses) to choose to join Medicare but not requiring them to do so would make for a much less disruptive transition, even if over time the role of private insurers grows smaller as more people switch to the government plan (which is likely to be more affordable). </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">Just as important, <span class="pullquote-right">Americans respond far more positively to the idea of opening up Medicare to those who want it than to the idea of moving them from their current plan to Medicare whether they want to or not.</span> Don't forget, over 150 million Americans </span><a href="https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-population/?dataView=1&amp;currentTimeframe=0&amp;sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D">currently</a> have employer-sponsored coverage, and people fear change whether the change will work out better for them in the long run or not.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">Which is why the safest path for a presidential candidate to take is probably to offer the broadest possible interpretation of Medicare-For-All, applying it to a variety of ideas that may not be precisely compatible with one another. The first step for some of them is to say that though they cosponsored Sanders's bill, they don't necessarily think private insurance has to be eliminated right away, if at all. That seems to be Harris's position, it's what Booker </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mviser/status/1091413449387769856">has said</a>, and it's what Warren <a href="https://slate.com/business/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-dodges-kamala-harris-medicare-for-all-question.html">says, too</a>. Gillibrand <a href="https://youtu.be/9id7F4viNWM">describes</a> a voluntary buy-in as a way to eventually get to a single-payer system.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8cc36d7c-7fff-c004-c2d2-e1a6dbe63eaa">Because it's so early in the race and none of the candidates has produced detailed campaign proposals on just about anything, at this point they can be pretty vague. But as the race proceeds, voters are going to demand more specificity, particularly since this issue is so close to the hearts of the Democratic base and will be such a critical priority for the next president. Right now they can say they're for multiple different ideas, and put them all under the umbrella of "Medicare-For-All." But probably not for long. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 03 Feb 2019 23:03:07 +0000232057 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanRepublicans May Have Finally Learned Their Lessonhttps://prospect.org/article/republicans-may-have-finally-learned-their-lesson
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen Donald Trump says that something he built, accomplished, or attached his name to was the most spectacular example of that thing that there ever was, he's usually lying. But not this time: The government shutdown that ended on Friday when he finally realized he was losing was in fact the longest in American history, and therefore in all likelihood the most consequential. It brought a huge amount of suffering down on government workers (who will at least get their back pay) as well as government contractors (who won't) and those whose businesses depend on government workers (ditto). It deprived people across the country of important services. It cut economic growth. It increased backlogs in places like immigration courts and the IRS. It will make it harder to recruit good people to work for the federal government. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">So while every prior government shutdown was bad, Trump can honestly claim that his was the worst by far. But there just may be a positive result of all that misery and difficulty: This could become the last government shutdown.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">In its early days, Annie Lowrey of <em>The Atlantic </em></span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/how-end-government-shutdowns/579331/">wrote an article</a> reviving an old and rather obscure idea to prevent government shutdowns: the automatic continuing resolution. She explained:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">Right now, when Congress cannot agree on how to spend money, it passes a continuing resolution, or CR, which continues federal agencies’ financing for a given period of time. Automatic CRs would absolve Congress from the responsibility of passing new CRs, preventing both quick financing lapses and big, painful shutdowns.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">The move would prevent the Senate from shutting down the government over disagreements with the House, Republicans from shutting down the government over disagreements with Democrats, and the White House from shutting down the government over disagreements with Congress. Money would just keep flowing at a steady rate, until Congress were to pass a formal budget or appropriations bill and the president were to sign it.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">It could have some negative consequences; for instance, a party happy with current funding levels could just refuse to allow a budget to pass and thereby keep everything the way it is for as long as it wants. But is that really worse than what we just went through?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">While the idea had been </span><a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41948.pdf">floated</a> before, right now it has real momentum. Democratic and Republican senators have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/politics/government-shutdown-legislation.html">introduced new bills</a> to create an automatic CR. Senator Mark Warner's is colorfully titled Stop Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage in the Coming Years, or the Stop STUPIDITY Act (yes, there's an extra "C," but cut him some slack; this kind of bill naming is hard).</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">It's particularly interesting to see at least some Republicans as eager to create an automatic CR as </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1089224410878353408">Democrats</a>, but it suggests they may have finally learned their lesson. All our recent shutdowns have come about because Republicans made demands they knew Democrats would find unacceptable, and every time they believed they could hold out longer than their opponents. After all, Democrats are the ones who care whether government functions properly, so they'd give in first, wouldn't they? The logic wasn't crazy, but every time—whether it was Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, or Donald Trump leading the shutdown—Republicans failed to predict the political damage they'd suffer. Americans know who the anti-government party is, and they learned enough about what was happening to correctly assign blame.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">It's a wonder that we never got around to passing an automatic CR before, but sometimes you have to hit bottom before you're willing to change. And for Republicans, this really was a lesson that would be hard not to learn. <span class="pullquote-right">As the shutdown wore on, with each passing day they took more and more political damage in a fight that they never wanted in the first place. </span>As Senator Lisa Murkowski </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/i-hope-we-get-some-common-sense-republicans-reeling-from-political-damage-cause-by-shutdown/2019/01/26/d50b87d4-2189-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html">told</a> <em>The Washington Post</em>, "What I have heard from our conference is a greater number of voices that are saying, 'Hey, this does not work so well. This is not a tool that we should be using.'"</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">But they felt they had to stand behind the president—up to a point. Though they were suffering already as the news was filled with stories of federal workers unable to pay their rent and heading to food banks, things got really bad when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/commerce-secretary-doesnt-understand-why-unpaid-federal-workers-use-food-banks/2019/01/24/866d3100-1fe4-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html">expressed</a> his bewilderment at why the workers didn't just take out loans, and President Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/24/trump-officials-keep-showing-they-have-no-idea-what-its-like-live-real-world">followed up</a> by offering his ludicrous belief that banks and grocery stores would "work along" with furloughed workers by letting them pay at a later date. That's how it works, right?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">Republicans are never going to stop representing the interests of the wealthy, but at least some of them seem to realize that they can't trust their colleagues not to be so terrible at hiding their contempt for the plodding masses who didn't have the foresight to be born rich. And by now they should have learned that shutting down the government never works out well for them. Not only did they get blamed by the public in poll after poll (and properly so), the shutdown made it all the harder for Trump to make the fantastical claim that life in America since his election has been unmitigated bliss (when our families aren't being murdered by immigrants, that is). A new </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/wrong-track-public-sours-nation-s-direction-after-shutdown-n963051">NBC News/<em>Wall Street Journal</em></a> poll shows 63 percent of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track, which isn't what a president thinking about his reelection campaign wants to hear.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">So it might just be possible to get the votes in Congress to make future shutdowns impossible, and Trump—who would no doubt prefer not to go through this again, having been so roundly bested by Nancy Pelosi—would probably sign it.</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-4e6bce7c-7fff-775c-e2e5-7e42b4839e18">And while they're at it, they ought to </span><a href="https://theweek.com/articles/716303/debt-ceiling-madness">eliminate the debt ceiling</a>, too. Who knows—the result of this miserable episode could be a government less susceptible to the destructive whims of a toddler president and a reckless Republican Party. Wouldn't that be something.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 27 Jan 2019 22:15:07 +0000232012 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhat the 2020 Democratic Primary Campaign Will Really Be Abouthttps://prospect.org/article/what-2020-democratic-primary-campaign-will-really-be-about
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a"><span class="dropcap">I</span>n 2016, many Democratic voters were less than thrilled with the spectrum of choices they were offered in the presidential primaries. Hillary Clinton was the seemingly inevitable nominee and most of the big Democratic names decided to sit out the race, so voters were left with her, Martin O'Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, the fact that Bernie emerged as the only real alternative to Clinton was a key part of his candidacy becoming the phenomenon, especially among young people, that it was.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">But 2020 will be the opposite: an enormous collection of candidates almost too large to fully assess. Last week Kirsten Gillibrand announced her candidacy, which by my count makes six official candidates and 14 others who are considering running. As voters dutifully pore over their records and proposals (I'm only half-kidding) to see who is the most appealing, there is one seldom-mentioned factor that could determine the Democratic nominee.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">Presidential politics, as too many otherwise smart people fail to understand, is far more about identity than it is about issues, at least as we who are immersed in it think about "issues." Successful presidential candidates are those attuned not only to who they are, but how they make voters feel about </span><em>themselves</em>.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">That isn't to say that voters don't care about the economy or foreign policy or health care. But those issues inevitably become fuel for an ongoing conversation about identity, both the identity of the candidates and the identity of the voters.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">To understand what I mean, let's start by looking back at Barack Obama's 2008 candidacy. Obama was unusually skilled and charismatic, but he also understood how his own identity and the identity of a changing Democratic coalition could intersect. He was everything Democratic voters wanted to see themselves as, or at the very least the kind of guy they'd like to be friends with: young, educated, thoughtful, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, multiracial. Even older Democrats just liked the idea that this was what a Democrat looked like, not some awkward, stuffy technocrat like Dukakis, Gore, or Kerry, but the coolest guy in the room.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">What was so brilliant about Obama's candidacy, however, was not just what he told Democratic voters about himself but what he told them about themselves. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">A key part of it, I'm convinced, came from an understanding of the progression of American history. A half-century after television reached into nearly every American home and became the window through which we understand the world, Obama told voters that they need not be merely spectators anymore. Like their parents and grandparents who participated in historic events (World War II, the tumult of the 1960s) instead of just watching them on the tube, they could shape the world. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">If you look back at </span><a href="https://youtu.be/cNZaq-YKCnE">the speech</a> Obama gave after winning the Iowa caucus—the key turning point of the primary campaign—you'll be struck by how many times he repeats the word "you."</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="margin-left: 40px;">On this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do ... you came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. ... You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that's consumed Washington. ... I know you didn't do this for me. You did this—you did this because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">And he told his supporters not only that they were powerful, but that they were making history, and one day they would look back and marvel at their own accomplishment:</span></p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long; when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause; when we finally gave Americans who have never participated in politics a reason to stand up and to do so.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">This was the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism, the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a"><span class="pullquote-right">So when you gave Obama your support, you made a statement about yourself. </span>You were not a cynic and not a spectator (even if you were only spectating). You were hopeful and faithful, you had power and ability, and you were making history. It was intoxicating.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">And eight years later, Donald Trump ran a campaign that was just as attuned to the identity of his supporters. In his case it was not hope and optimism but fear and resentment, but it was just as powerful. And as we endure a government shutdown over his hope to build a wall on the southern border, it's important to understand what the wall—and his promise that Mexico would pay for it—symbolized.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">For his supporters Trump became a vehicle to unleash their true selves. He told them they no longer had to be polite to people they despised, that in fact politeness was an oppressive force they had permission to cast off. The time had come to tell those people—immigrants, minorities, women—exactly what you thought of them. And if you felt like your prospects were constrained and your dignity had been eroded, Trump offered a way to get it back. We'd kick out all the immigrants, build a wall, then force Mexico to pay for their own humiliation. Their disgrace would give you your power back. Trump could make you stand tall, and the contempt in which he was held by "the establishment" only made them love him more. What better feeling was there than owning the libs, than seeing the horror on some liberal wuss' face when you donned your MAGA hat? That too was intoxicating.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b53b5c4c-7fff-be5b-2ead-f157d7cf956a">So an appreciation for how your candidacy makes voters feel about themselves can be used for good or ill, to lift up what's best in people or to reach down and grab what's worst in them. It's far too early to tell which Democratic candidate will have the most powerful effect on voters' own identity. But the one who succeeds will probably be the one who has the most compelling answer to that challenge.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 20 Jan 2019 22:48:21 +0000231972 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Super Powershttps://prospect.org/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-has-super-powers
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<p>Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, together with Representative Ilhan Omar, walk down the House steps outside the U.S. Capitol. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151"><span class="dropcap">A</span>lexandria Ocasio-Cortez clearly has superpowers. When was the last time a freshman member of Congress was able to not just vault policy issues up the agenda with a </span><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/ocasio-cortez-70percent-idea-is-just-the-start-of-the-democratic-tax-debate.html">remark in an interview</a> or a <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/13/ocasio-cortez-climate-protestors-push-pelosi-962915">visit to a protest</a>, but whip much of Washington into such a frenzy of consternation and jealousy?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">We don't yet know how Ocasio-Cortez (already known by her initials AOC) will use these powers. But her extraordinary celebrity tells us a good deal about what politics, and the Democratic Party in particular, look like in 2019.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">Ocasio-Cortez's rise owes a great deal to her own gifts, but it also had something to do with timing. She was one of two Democrats to defeat a House incumbent in a 2018 primary, and since the national media had largely overlooked the race until her victory and were shocked that she took down a member of the Democratic leadership, she suddenly became a perfect symbol of the election that was underway. A young, charismatic, unapologetically progressive Latina booting out a doughy-looking old-school white guy pol with shoe leather and deft use of social media? You couldn't ask for a better story as Democrats were headed for a historic win driven by women voters. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">But as Ocasio-Cortez sailed through the general election an into Washington, she has shown some unusual skills, ones that seem to be driving Republicans absolutely nuts. Despite the occasional misstep, she seems earnest and even joyful (a rare quality), and has become a social media star. She has 2.4 million followers on </span><a href="https://twitter.com/AOC">Twitter</a> and another 1.8 million on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ocasio2018/?hl=en">Instagram</a>, where she mixes politics, policy, and humor in an appealing combination that few politicians can match.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">It isn't just natural charisma, though. In </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-takes-the-democrats-back-to-the-future-an-interview-with-the-historian-rick-perlstein">a recent interview</a>, historian Rick Perlstein put his finger on something important in the reaction people have to her, and why she's something many in both parties learned not to expect from a Democrat:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">I think psychologically there’s a lot of, shall we say, neurosis [among Democrats]. Again, going back to this trauma of the Reagan victory, the Gingrich victory, the Bush victories—it's people who built their political identities around a neurotic response to trauma.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">Generations of Democrats were shaped by those traumas, of having the American people reject them and then being rolled over by bold Republicans. The response of much of the party was to become defensive and timid, to work to show voters that they could be tough on crime and welfare, or support military adventurism, or try in a hundred ways to prove that they weren't really liberals. Like animals who had suffered too many beatings, they flinched in fear at the first sign of a raised fist from the right. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">That's how you got milquetoast, apologetic presidential candidacies like those of Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry, among other things. And when Barack Obama ran for president, one of the most intoxicating things about him was that he didn't display any of that timidity. He might not have been the most liberal candidate, but he wasn't trying to pretend to be more conservative than he was. Over the course of his presidency he certainly displayed ideological caution on issues like health care or going after the big banks in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown. But he didn't exude fear of the right the way so many other Democrats did.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151"><span class="pullquote-right">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too young to have been shaped by the traumas of the 1980s and 1990s, so she represents the next step in the Democratic evolution beyond them.</span> Not only is she not afraid of being attacked by Republicans, she's eager to advocate policies like single-payer health care and dramatically higher taxes for the wealthy despite the fact that she knows Republicans will react in horror.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">And oh boy, have they. They sometimes seem utterly </span><a href="https://youtu.be/pupmuOLj5Mg">obsessed</a> with everything from her thoughts about policy to her clothes. Which on one level isn't surprising, since there are so few politicians who actually seem like interesting people. Would you watch a dozen cable news segments on Kevin McCarthy? But conservatives are appalled by her for much the same reason progressives love her, because she embodies everything that the GOP rejects as a party and that Democrats want to embrace.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">Not every Democrat, however. Or at least one can say that her overwhelming celebrity has made some in her party a little uneasy about her. Last week <em>Politico</em> published </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/11/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democrats-establisment-1093728">a story</a> entitled "Exasperated Democrats try to rein in Ocasio-Cortez," which may have been overblown (there isn't some kind of anti-AOC conspiracy in the party), but it did feature some more veteran members of the House gently suggesting that she be a little less bold and a little more, well, traditional. Likewise, <em>The New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/nyregion/ocasio-cortez-democrats-congress.html">reports</a> that "Her rise has stirred a backlash among some Congressional Democrats, who are seeking to constrain her anti-establishment streak and fear her more radical ideas could tar the party as socialist." No doubt nearly every other Democrat in the House would be happy to get the kind of attention she's been getting.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-348bf339-7fff-cbb8-2461-e2cf30a31151">Whatever her career holds—and don't forget, she's only 29—Ocasio-Cortez signals the coming of a new kind of Democratic Party. It will take some time for the transition to complete itself, and it will naturally include old-fashioned Democrats too. But it won't be returning to its old self, and that's what really ought to have Republicans unsettled.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 13 Jan 2019 21:37:46 +0000231915 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Shutdown -- and All the Other Trump Chaos -- Is Just What We Expectedhttps://prospect.org/article/shutdown-and-all-other-trump-chaos-just-what-we-expected
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<p>President Donald Trump's hands are folded as he speaks in the Oval Office of the White House. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen controversy arose in 2016 over Trump University, the defunct operation in which Donald Trump conned gullible and desperate customers out of thousands of dollars and in some cases their life savings, the Republican presidential nominee insisted that in fact the attendees at the real estate seminars couldn't have been happier with the wealth-creating secrets they had learned. In fact, </span><a href="http://time.com/4246394/donald-trump-university-98-percent-approval-lawsuit/">he said</a>, the program received "98 percent approval rating by the students that took the course—98 percent," a series of "beautiful statements" attesting to their satisfaction. "That's why I won't settle the case."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">In the end, Trump did settle the case, </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/politics/trump-university-settlement-finalized-trnd/index.html">paying</a> his victims $25 million. But I bring this up because what he's saying now about the government shutdown has such a familiar ring to it. The people Trump is victimizing are, in his telling, enthusiastic about not being able to pay their bills. "Many of those workers have said to me, communicated—stay out until you get the funding for the wall," he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-vows-not-to-reopen-federal-government-until-wall-funding-is-secured/2018/12/25/5df4826c-0858-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html">said</a> on Christmas. This wave of government employees calling up the White House switchboard and getting patched through to the Oval Office so they can express their support has apparently not abated; on Friday, Trump <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-shutdown-furloughed-workers_us_5c2fc50ce4b0bcb4c25bab28">said</a>, "Many of those people, maybe most of those people, that really have not been―and will not be getting their money in at this moment―those people, in many cases, are the biggest fan of what we're doing."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">This is just one small way in which the pre-presidential Trump provided a perfect guide to what Trump would be like as president. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">As abysmal as the 2016 campaign was, you can't say that it didn't show us—at least those of us who were paying sufficient attention—what this presidency would be like. And the shutdown crisis is yet another reminder that the Trump we saw then is precisely the Trump we've gotten every day since.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">We saw then that Trump is spectacularly dishonest and corrupt, even if we didn't yet understand the full extent of that corruption; for instance, it was only this past October that we learned that Trump and his family engaged in </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html">a massive tax fraud scheme</a> that bilked the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. We also saw that he is both genuinely racist and happy to cynically encourage racism in others to achieve his own ends. And we saw how he thrives on crisis, finding opportunity for personal advantage at moments when others are trying to restore order and limit the damage he has caused. As Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution <a href="https://twitter.com/jaysbookman/status/1081561083746357248">noted</a>, "over the years he has learned that he has a much higher tolerance for chaos and disruption than other people. He has also learned to weaponize that trait by creating so much chaos and pain that others will surrender and give him what he wants."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">Which is precisely what Trump is trying to do now. His lack of concern for the welfare of the 800,000 or so federal workers affected by the shutdown may be his greatest advantage, since Democrats actually care what happens to those workers and want the government to provide services to the public. Since Trump doesn't, he probably thinks he can outlast them. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">And he may be right; this is already the third-longest shutdown in history, and by next weekend it will be the longest. Trump has </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/04/politics/shutdown-donald-trump-nancy-pelosi/index.html">said</a> that if he doesn't get his border wall, it could last months or even years.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e"><span class="pullquote-right">The shutdown is just one of the predictable crises Trump and his government face. </span>His campaign, his transition, his administration, his business, and his foundation are all under investigation. At the moment Trump has an acting secretary of defense, an acting attorney general, an acting chief of staff, no secretary of the interior, and no ambassador to the United Nations; to one degree or another, the people who held those positions all left in either disgrace or disgust. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">That too was predictable from the Trump we saw in 2016. Whether in his business or his campaign, he attracted those with the least integrity, which is why his former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser, and personal lawyer have all pled guilty to crimes. The law-abiding who went to work for him eventually found their reputations corroded beyond repair. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">And a president who spent a lifetime believing rules and laws were for the little people has shown himself to feel the same way as president, threatening to use the government to go after his political opponents, almost certainly obstructing justice, monetizing the presidency for his family's benefit, and generally acting as though the entire structure of Constitution and law is for suckers. His latest threat is to </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/06/trump-emergency-border-wall-government-shutdown-1082712">declare</a> a "national emergency" so he can divert funds from the Department of Defense to start building more walls along the border, which every sane expert has greeted with the same incredulity that so many of his other ideas have been met with.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">As awful as it all is, none of it has surprised anyone. Had I told you in 2016 that Trump would lie and bumble his way through his first two years in office, display his ignorance and impulsiveness every day, cause a monumental political backlash against his appalling rule that swept Democrats back into power, then force a government shutdown to get his idiotic wall, all the while blaming his own mistakes on the opposition and claiming absurdly that most Americans approved of everything he was doing, you would have said, "That sounds about right." Had I told you of a new dawn of government corruption, of America's degraded image in the world, of strained alliances, and of a government staffed by incompetents, crooks, and fools, you would have said, "Of course that's what will happen."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f80e8968-7fff-56e7-b903-4cff1ce4d73e">So Trump will continue to horrify and appall us, causing damage that we can only begin to measure. What else did you expect?</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 06 Jan 2019 23:13:49 +0000231840 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanTrump's Wall Keeps Getting Smallerhttps://prospect.org/article/trumps-wall-keeps-getting-smaller
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<p>Honduran asylum seekers are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents after the group crossed the U.S. border wall into San Diego, California. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65"><span class="dropcap">I</span>f you're an ardent Trump supporter, the president is not making things easy for you. This is particularly true when it comes to his "big, beautiful wall" that was supposed to stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, not just a physical barrier to immigrants but a symbol of all the hopes you poured into Trump's candidacy. Two years into his presidency it still hasn't risen out of the desert, it doesn't look like it's getting closer, and all the president offers you for his failure to deliver on his promise is excuses and misdirection.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">For a brief moment last week, it appeared that some sense would prevail in Donald Trump's White House. Just as he had on multiple occasions before, the president threatened to veto the spending bill necessary to keep the government open unless he got funding earmarked for his border wall. But in the past Trump has always backed down, persuaded that it wasn't worth shutting down the government. That looked like what would happen this time as well: a temporary bill to keep the government open for a while, putting off the argument over the wall for another day. Without the votes to make it happen, he appeared to have no other choice.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">That is, until this most capricious of presidents heard from the people with the most influence over him: conservative media figures. Trump may be casting off advisers left and right, but he still seeks the counsel of Fox News each and every day ("He spends ever more time in front of a television, often retreating to his residence out of concern that he is being watched too closely," </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/us/politics/trump-two-years.html">reports</a> <em>The New York Times</em>). And what he saw there changed his mind.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">Trump probably thought he had gotten them all used to a cycle: Promise a showdown over the wall, then retreat, but claim victory anyway. This time, however, he made things bad by pledging in front of dozens of cameras in an </span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-meeting-senate-minority-leader-chuck-schumer-house-speaker-designate-nancy-pelosi/">Oval Office meeting</a> with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, "I am proud to shut down the government for border security...I will be the one to shut it down. I'm not going to blame you for it." That raised expectations on the right too high, and when it appeared he would back off, there was a mini-rebellion. "It was supposed to be a 'big beautiful wall' with a 'big beautiful door.' Now it’s just an open door with no frame. Unreal. #BorderDisorder #GOPFail," <a href="https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1075562795947749381">tweeted</a> Fox host Laura Ingraham. Trump's most loyal supporters "want their wall and they want it now," <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/20/trump-budget-reversal-1071388">said</a> Dan Bongino, guest-hosting for Trump's good friend Sean Hannity. Similar notes were sounded on conservatives talk radio. Trump was watching it all unfold, and realized he had to come through for his base, no matter the cost.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">So now the government is shut down, a testament, Trump no doubt hopes, to his commitment to the wall. But one can't help but wonder: Have Trump's supporters noticed how the wall keeps shrinking, to the point where it's a shadow of its former imagined splendor?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">First it was supposed to cover the entire border, but not anymore. Then for some reason Trump decided that it's not a wall at all, but "</span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075197395892404231">artistically designed steel slats</a>." He even sent out a picture on Friday:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">A design of our Steel Slat Barrier which is totally effective while at the same time beautiful! <a href="https://t.co/sGltXh0cu9">pic.twitter.com/sGltXh0cu9</a></p>
<p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1076239448461987841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 21, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">Ah yes, so beautiful. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">And what about the most important part of the entire promise Trump made in 2016, that Mexico would pay for the wall? Make no mistake, that was the very heart of the pledge, making clear that it was not just a physical barrier but a symbol of our restored strength. This is something Trump has always been acutely aware of; in </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/australia-mexico-transcripts/">a phone call</a> on January 27, 2017, just a week after he took office, Trump begged then-president Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico to stop saying that Mexico wouldn't pay for the wall. "If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that," Trump said, explaining that "this is the least important thing that we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important." Peña Nieto refused to budge, saying that "this is an issue related to the dignity of Mexico and goes to the national pride of my country."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">Peña Nieto was no fool. He knew that paying for the wall would be a national shaming for Mexico, </span><em>which was precisely the point</em>. <span class="pullquote-right">Trump promised his supporters that Mexico's humiliation and subjugation would be the vehicle for the restoration of their own dignity and pride.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">And what does Trump say now? He can't possibly admit that it was a preposterous idea from the beginning and anyone who believed it had to have been an idiot. So the brain trust at the White House came up with an answer to the inevitable question: Mexico </span><em>is </em>paying for the wall! How? Because we made some minor adjustments to NAFTA, and if that works out there might be some increased exports to Mexico, and that means they paid for it so he kept his promise. All White House staffers are now <a href="https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1075677435327217664">required to repeat</a> this bit of laughable nincompoopery.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">So the big, beautiful wall across the entire border that Mexico will pay for is now some steel slat fencing in certain places that Mexico is not paying for. Mission accomplished?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">But if Trump is wondering whether his base will accept it, he probably doesn't have to worry. Not because they're stupid enough to believe what he's telling them on a rational level, but because emotionally speaking, they have little choice. If you voted for Trump because of things like building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, are you going to now admit that you got swindled by America's most prominent con artist, just like any gullible enrollee of Trump University? That he was obviously lying all along and you were too dumb to see it? What would that make you?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5dc1c458-7fff-e285-5225-1e735eef4a65">It would make you a sucker, that's what. And nobody wants that. So don't be surprised when the next time your local paper does one of its regular "In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Still Support Trump" dispatches, little has changed.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 24 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000231763 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Worst Mistake of Their Liveshttps://prospect.org/article/worst-mistake-their-lives
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<p>Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen Michael Cohen first put Donald Trump in his sights, he obviously had a plan. Over a decade ago, Cohen owned a number of apartments in Trump-branded buildings when he intervened on Trump's side in a dispute on the condo board of Trump World Tower, in which some tenants wanted to remove Trump's name from the building. With Cohen's help the pro-Trump side prevailed, and The Donald was so impressed he brought Cohen into his inner circle.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">You can imagine what Cohen thought at that point. Here I am, working for the famous Donald Trump! This is going to be great for me. Money, prestige, globetrotting excitement—anything is possible.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">Cohen's association with Trump did indeed get him those things, at least for a while. But now that association is sending him to jail.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">We're seeing something similar with many of Trump's associates. They looked at Trump, a larger-than-life figure with fame and money, and believed that attaching themselves to him could bring them something they wanted, or in some cases, sorely needed. For a while it seemed like it would, but in the end it came crashing down, and they wound up in far worse shape than when they started. Instead of rehabilitation or redemption, Trump gave them ignominy or even time behind bars. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">Take Paul Manafort. To outward appearances, in 2016 he was a high-flying, wealthy, and influential political consultant, well known in Washington and with a long list of lucrative (if often disreputable) clients. But in fact, he was enmeshed in a web of crimes, </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/24/manaforts-russia-connection-what-you-need-to-know-about-oleg-deripaska">deep in debt</a> to a potentially dangerous Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, and had not long before <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/">threatened</a> to his family that he might commit suicide.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">It might seem insanely reckless for someone on that kind of knife's edge to take a job running the campaign of a presidential nominee, in which he'd suddenly be subjected to attention and scrutiny. But Manafort was desperate, and working for Trump looked like it might give him the chance to set things right. It could lead to more clients in the future and perhaps provide the opportunity to get Deripaska—who had given Manafort $19 million to invest, money that </span><a href="https://www.apnews.com/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a">disappeared</a> somewhere along the way—off his back. Manafort was so desperate, in fact, that he offered to work for no pay. Days after joining the Trump campaign, Manafort <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/manafort-offered-to-give-russian-billionaire-private-briefings-on-2016-campaign/2017/09/20/399bba1a-9d48-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html">wrote</a> to his colleague Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian national who may have been a Russian intelligence asset and who acted as a liaison with Deripaska, pointing out the attention he was getting in the press. "How do we use to get whole?" Manafort asked.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">He did not get whole. Instead, the crimes he had been committing for years were revealed to prosecutors and the world. Manafort will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">Or consider Michael Flynn. Flynn became nationally known in 2016, including a turn leading a "lock her up" chant at the Republican national convention, because at the time he was just about the only retired general willing to endorse Trump. But he too was looking for redemption. Fired by Barack Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, Flynn had </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/obama-warned-trump-against-hiring-mike-flynn-say-officials-n756316">gained a reputation</a> for being a poor manager and someone with nutty ideas and conspiracy theories, which some around him at DIA referred to as "Flynn facts." As one staffer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/michael-flynn-partisan-warrior">told <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em></a>, "We talked all the time among ourselves about what was going on in his head. Like, was it PTSD, or was this who he was all along and now he finally had the authority to say it?"</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">By 2016 Flynn was hustling money from foreign governments like Turkey and Russia, but Trump offered him not just a path back to respectability but something greater. As national security adviser, he could not only shape policy but enter the highest stratum of Washington's elite. Flynn was the one person whom Barack Obama urged Trump not to hire, but Trump did it anyway.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">And what happened to Flynn? Instead of riding Trump to glory and a permanent supply of respect and income, he lost his job and had to cooperate with Robert Mueller's probe in order to avoid jail time. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">There are others who thought Trump would be a ticket to the big time but who wound up on the wrong side of the law, like George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates. We could make an entirely separate list of those who have been revealed to be corrupt or worse because of their association with the president (Rob Porter, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke) or had their reputations damaged or destroyed (Sean Spicer, H.R. McMaster). </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">Last week, James Fallows </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/john-kelly-and-trumps-test-character/577708">asked</a>, "Who has been turned into something worse by Donald Trump? Who was that way all along?" There is no single answer, because there are some who fall into one or the other category, and some who were probably terrible to begin with and then were made worse. I suspect Cohen is in this last category; his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/business/michael-cohen-lawyer-trump.html">career</a> even before encountering Trump was full of shady situations and brushes with criminals. In fact, looking over that history it's remarkable that he never wound up in jail before now, even as many of his associates did. What finally did Michael Cohen in was Donald Trump.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7746fe2d-7fff-ae3a-9da1-cf2f03fe16ce">To be sure, there are some in Trump's orbit who will be able to parlay their association with him into riches; I'm sure there are plenty of corporations who would pay top dollar to make use of Sarah Sanders' extraordinary shamelessness and moral flexibility, to take just one example. But no one will look better for having worked for him. And many will find that if they hoped Trump would offer them some kind of deliverance, they made the worst mistake of their lives. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 16 Dec 2018 22:25:50 +0000231660 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Trump Scandals Were Inevitablehttps://prospect.org/article/trump-scandals-were-inevitable
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<p>Michael Cohen walks out of federal court in New York.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3"><span class="dropcap">I</span>n a </span><a href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/read-prosecutors-sentencing-recommendation-for-michael-cohen/3340/">sentencing memo</a> explaining why they believe Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen should get substantial jail time, federal prosecutors contended on Friday that the president of the United States directed a scheme to violate election laws by making large unreported payments to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with him. Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller argued for leniency, hinting at more revelations to come regarding Russia: "Cohen provided the [special counsel's office] with useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with [Trump Organization] executives during the campaign," Mueller wrote. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">As extraordinary as it is to hear prosecutors make this accusation in an official document, you might not have greeted them with the shock they deserve, since we've know about the story in broad terms for a while. But it was inevitable that we'd wind up here, with Trump in a deepening scandal, hounded by the law, and desperately claiming his own innocence while begging his supporters to close their eyes to the truth.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">Really: Could anything different have happened?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">Each presidential administration has its own set of scandals. At one end you have something like the Nixon administration, with a criminal conspiracy involving dozens of officials and the direct involvement of the president; at the other end you have an administration like Barack Obama's, with only the most minor molehills the opposition party unsuccessfully attempted to turn into mountains, none of which ever got anywhere near a president whose own behavior seemed without ethical blemish. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">And then there's Trump. Even before we began to understand the breadth of the Russia scandal, the payoffs to models, or the business shenanigans, we knew, or at least should have known, that there was simply no way he'd get through a term in office without being caught up in a scandal to rival Watergate or Iran-Contra.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">It isn't simply that on a personal basis Trump is so deeply corrupt, though that may have been a necessary condition. It continues to amaze that someone who spent a lifetime skating away from the law, stiffing creditors, and running scams like Trump University could actually be elected to the highest post in the land. His corruption is so profound that two months ago <em>The New York Times</em> published </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html">an extraordinary exposé</a> documenting that Trump and his family engaged in a years-long scheme to defraud the U.S. government of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, and it was news for about a day and a half. When we learn that the great opponent of illegal immigration is himself <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/06/president-trump-uses-undocumented-immigrant-labor-is-anyone-surprised">employing undocumented immigrants</a> at his properties, it barely makes a blip in the news because precisely no one is surprised.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3"><span class="pullquote-right">In some alternate universe, at some point in 2015 Trump would have said to himself, "OK, I'm running for president now—I've got to clean up my act and make sure I only have ethical people around me." </span>That isn't what he did, of course, for two reasons. First, he seems to be attracted to grifters, scammers, and con artists, people who don't care where the ethical lines are and agree with him that if you cooperate with the authorities </span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/trump-stop-snitching.html">you're a dirty snitch</a>. Second, those are precisely the kind of people who are attracted to him. You weren't going to find too many upstanding citizens in the pile of résumés at Trump Tower.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">And to repeat, we saw this before he got elected. For instance, most presidential candidates trumpet endorsements from retired generals and admirals, but Trump could find precious few who would publicly support him. The one who did? Michael Flynn, someone with a long resume but a crackpot's temperament, given to insane conspiracy theorizing and, as it turned out, some flexible ideas about obeying the law. It isn't just the crime to which Flynn pleaded guilty (lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials) but things like the fact that he was working for the Trump campaign while </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mueller-gives-new-details-flynn-s-secretive-work-turkey-n943926">secretly on the payroll</a> of a foreign country (Turkey) that made him such a good match for Trump.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">We could have known something fishy was up when Trump chose as his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, long known in Washington as probably the most ethically challenged member of the lobbyist profession (no small feat), legendary for representing some of the world's worst dictators and, as it turned out, guilty of an astonishingly long list of crimes.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">Then there's Trump's "personal lawyer" and factotum Michael Cohen, who wound up facing the prospect of years behind bars as soon as prosecutors started examining his business affairs, including his work for the Trump organization. Perhaps you might have had to be insightful to have watched one of Cohen's 2016 TV appearances advocating for Trump and said, "Before this is all over, that guy is definitely going to wind up in jail." But not that insightful. He reeked of it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">It was obvious that none of the people around Trump were the top-notch, platinum quality personnel he claimed to hire; instead, it was as though he sought to gather around him the worst people he could find. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">Which may have been exactly what was necessary to do business, both commercial and political, the way he wanted. If you were a person of the highest ethical standards, you wouldn't last a week in Trump's employ before quitting in disgust, and very possibly calling the authorities to report what you'd seen or been asked to participate in. Trump </span><em>needs </em>people of low character, or at the very least people with a tolerance for transgressions being committed around them.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">Maybe what happened in 2016 was that Trump's most dramatic personality flaws—his repulsive misogyny, his appalling ignorance, his naked bigotry—distracted us from how corrupt he was, so that when we imagined him as president we thought he'd abuse women, target minorities, bumble around incompetently, and generally act like a boorish halfwit, but we didn't quite consider the certainty of scandal. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5757ca0a-7fff-c895-50d0-b5e305c069d3">We don't even know the full extent of it; Robert Mueller obviously has many more cards to play. But if it wasn't Russia, it would have been something else. With Donald Trump as president, a historic scandal was always inevitable. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 09 Dec 2018 23:15:46 +0000231626 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanRepublicans Against Democracyhttps://prospect.org/article/republicans-against-democracy
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93"><span class="dropcap">"</span>Can we really get away with this?" It's a question I've often wondered if Republicans ask themselves, but all evidence suggests that if it comes up, the answer they give is, "Sure—why the hell not?" And with good reason. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Since Donald Trump became president we've heard a lot about norms, the informal expectations and patterns of behavior that govern much of the political world. We've discussed them because Trump so often breaks them, in ways small and large. There's no law saying the president has to release his tax returns, or can't publicly demand that the Justice Department investigate his political opponents—it's just how everyone accepted that things would work. But Trump, who has spent a lifetime being taught that he can do whatever he wants, determined upon entering politics that he wouldn't pay a price for flouting norms of presidential behavior or even basic human decency. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">But it didn't start with him. Republicans have been pushing against norms for years, in ways that have consisted demonstrated an undeniable creativity. They not only do what Democrats wouldn't dare, they come up with new ways to distort the system that nobody had ever thought of.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Which is what is happening right now in multiple states: a shocking and repugnant attack on the will of the electorate and on democracy itself, from a party that plainly believes it can get away with just about anything. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Let's start in Wisconsin, where Republicans gerrymandered so ruthlessly after taking control of the state government in 2010 that this year, Democratic candidates </span><a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-11-17/midterm-elections-reveal-effects-of-gerrymandered-districts">won</a> 54 percent of votes for the state house but Republicans held on to an incredible 64 percent of the seats. So power in the state will be split between a Republican-controlled legislature and newly elected Democratic Governor Tony Evers. That, however, is unacceptable to the GOP, so <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/30/lawmakers-consider-changes-early-voting-transportation-funding-2020-presidential-primary/2162684002/">they're moving</a> to limit the powers of the governor in a lame-duck session:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">MADISON — Republican lawmakers are seeking to limit voter turnout and want to take away key powers from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general before GOP Gov. Scott Walker leaves office in January. [...]</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">The legislation is wide-ranging and would limit Evers' power in a host of ways. His agencies would have less freedom to run their programs. He would not be able to ban guns from the state Capitol without the OK of lawmakers.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">The power of the incoming attorney general also would be greatly diminished. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Among other things, the plan would give the legislature the ability to stop the attorney general from withdrawing from a multistate Republican lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. "Lawmakers are also considering separating the 2020 presidential primary election from an April spring election to reduce voter turnout in an effort to boost the election chances of a conservative Supreme Court justice." </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">And it isn't just Wisconsin. Here's </span><a href="https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/29/michigan-bill-limit-democratic-power/2156549002/">what's happening in Michigan</a>, with a similar situation in which Republicans' gerrymandering enabled them to <a href="https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2018/11/07/once-again-michigan-dems-get-more-state-senate-and-house-votes-but-gop-keeps-power">retain control</a> of the state house and senate despite winning fewer votes, while Democrats swept the statewide elections:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">LANSING — With Democrats set to take over top statewide offices next year, Michigan Republicans are considering proposals that would allow the Legislature to intervene in legal battles and shift oversight of the state's campaign finance law to a new commission.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">The lame-duck power plays would limit the power of Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Democrats have not held all three posts since 1990.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">And </span><a href="http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-wisconsin-republicans-governor-tony-evers-power.html">according</a> to <em>Governing </em>magazine, "In Florida, there were rumors prior to the election that Republican legislators were preparing to strip the governor of some powers if Democrat Andrew Gillum won."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Where did they get this idea? Republicans in North Carolina—where, yes, this year the GOP won </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/13/least-three-states-republicans-lost-popular-vote-won-house">fewer votes</a> but held on to a majority of legislative seats thanks to gerrymandering—led the way two years ago after governor Roy Cooper got elected. They held a lame-duck session after the 2016 election to strip the governor's office of a range a powers, in a bill the outgoing Republican governor <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/17/nc-gop-strips-some-democratic-governors-power/95555182/">signed</a>. Everyone assumed that the next time a Republican is elected governor, the powers would be restored.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">This is a three-step maneuver: Gerrymander brutally when you have the chance; hold on to power even when you lose the vote; then hamstring the Democrat the voters elected. It's the kind of thing that until a few years ago no one would have even contemplated.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">But as I said, Republicans are nothing if not creative. You can date this era of democracy-rigging back to the 2000 Florida debacle, which taught Republicans a number of lessons, including that voter purges are an effective way to keep large numbers of Democrats </span><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/">from the polls</a>, intimidating election officials can <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/15/its-insanity-how-brooks-brothers-riot-killed-recount-miami">stop vote counts</a>, it's important to have a secretary of state in place who can put her <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/11/14/controversy-swirls-around-harris/0962659a-aa23-4e2d-b3b7-5831badcd62a">thumb on the scales</a> in a close election, and if all else fails, the Supreme Court will <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore">bail you out</a>. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">Put them all together and you have a meta-lesson that Republicans took to heart: </span><em>We can get away with anything</em>. It doesn't matter whether we're the target of a stern editorial from <em>The New York Times</em>, or whether Democrats squawk. What matters is winning.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">So in subsequent years they just kept on pushing, particularly after Barack Obama became president. Can we just filibuster </span>everything? Sure, why not! Can we threaten to default on America's debt? Go for it! Shut down the government? Have at it! The breaking of norms culminated in the refusal to allow Obama's nominee for a vacant Supreme Court seat to get so much as a hearing. One can't help but wonder if at the time someone said, "Can we really just refuse to hear the nomination of a Supreme Court justice? Won't we be punished?" And the answer was, "Who's going to punish us? The voters? Give me a break."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">They were right, in 2016 at least. And let's be honest: Voters in 2018 weren't rejected the bottomless cynicism of the GOP nearly as much as they were rejecting Donald Trump. And now there's a partisan Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which will be happy to rubber-stamp just about any move Republican states take to rig the game in the GOP's favor. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d5fa4bbb-7fff-443a-8280-f9fa2dbb0c93">We often hear laments in the media about how unrelentingly nasty and partisan American politics has become. But as it is today, only one of our two great parties demonstrates such outright contempt for democracy. The Republican Party simply does not believe in the idea that the candidate who gets the most votes is the one who should govern, should that candidate be a Democrat. And in the years to come, as the people they represent make up a smaller and smaller proportion of the American population, they'll come to believe it in even less than they do now and rely even more on rigging the game in order to hold power. After all, who's going to stop them?</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 02 Dec 2018 23:16:24 +0000231609 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDon't Mess with Nancy Pelosihttps://prospect.org/article/dont-mess-nancy-pelosi-0
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f"><span class="dropcap">P</span>olitics, Albert Einstein supposedly said, is more difficult than physics. It's full of uncontrolled variables, experiments impossible to repeat, and human beings in all their unpredictable cravenness, ambition, and ignorance. In our media-saturated age, when we call someone a good politician we're usually thinking of their charisma, their rhetorical skill, and their ability to win the affections of their constituents. The quieter work that goes on in back rooms is harder to see and therefore to judge.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Except at certain moments like this one. Nancy Pelosi, target of endless criticism and thousands upon thousands of attack ads, is showing what it means to be a good politician. While she hasn't yet guaranteed her place as the next speaker of the House, she is busily dismantling the rebellion she has faced in the last year or so, what appeared to be the most serious threat to her leadership in the 16 years she has led House Democrats. And in the process, she's showing why she's stuck around for so long. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">As rebellions go, it has been pretty weak. A group of centrist Democrats led by Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts has long complained that Pelosi is the wrong face for the Democratic Party, that her status as a lightning rod for Republican attacks puts other Democrats in the awkward position of having to defend her in every election. So they decided to put everything they could into a leadership challenge.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Pelosi's opponents were heartened when numerous candidates in this year's election said they wouldn't support her when it came time to choose a Democratic speaker, or at least that they were disinclined to do so. Some of them were centrists, but some of those raising doubts were progressives who told voters that it's time for new leadership in the party.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">But <span class="pullquote-right">"It's time for new leadership" is just a slogan—neither a bill of particulars against Pelosi nor an alternative to her.</span> And that was the biggest problem Pelosi's opponents had: They never came up with an alternative. Not only did they not have some vision of a different </span>sort of party leadership, they never found someone to actually run against Pelosi. They put together <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/19/politics/anti-pelosi-democrats-letter-speakers-race/index.html">a letter</a> signed by 16 members demanding someone else as speaker, but none of them wanted to step forward themselves.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Then some of them suggested Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio as an alternative candidate, and Fudge said she was open to the idea—until she met with Pelosi. When the meeting </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/20/fudge-endorses-pelosi-for-speaker-dropping-potential-challenge-1009352">was over</a>, Fudge endorsed Pelosi and Pelosi announced that in the new Congress, Fudge will chair a newly created subcommittee on elections. It was classic transactional politics of the type that is often condemned, but also makes the wheels of politics turn.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Not long after, one of the signers of the letter, Representative Brian Higgins of New York, </span><a href="https://buffalonews.com/2018/11/21/higgins-in-a-reversal-will-back-pelosi/">announced</a> that he'd be backing Pelosi after all too, once she promised him that issues he cares about (infrastructure and a Medicare buy-in) would be prioritized in the next Congress and he'd take the lead on the Medicare issue.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Other members required ideological assurance more than assignments. Pelosi convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the opposition was driven by centrists, and got the rising star's endorsement; "So long as Leader Pelosi remains the most progressive candidate for speaker, she can count on my support," Ocasio-Cortez </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1065335143529877505">said</a>. Another high-profile freshman who had been skeptical of Pelosi, Sharice Davids of Kansas, <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/house/418083-freshman-davids-announces-support-for-pelosi">announced</a> her support over the weekend. Then another member who had signed the letter pledging to vote against her, Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/25/nancy-pelosi-house-speaker-democrats-opposition-1014683">backed off</a> his opposition.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Pelosi still has more members to persuade, but the process she's undertaking is exactly what she has done for years when trying to assemble support for a key vote. She understands the position of all her members, talks to them, determines what their interests and feelings are, and figures out what will induce them to come over to her side. It's a task that requires systematic preparation and careful implementation. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">One can't help but note the contrast with President Trump, who believes himself to be the world's greatest negotiator but is actually terrible at negotiating. He never thinks he needs to prepare and never puts in the effort to understand those he's trying to convince. He thought members of Congress were like plumbing contractors, and he could strong-arm them and then stiff them, and it would work out because he was the one with the power. He never bothered to figure out what their interests and incentives were, because he just didn't care. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">Which is why again and again Trump either failed (like with getting his border wall or repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act) or just got played for a fool (</span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/11/12/north-korea-played-trump-for-a-fool-just-as-we-knew-they-would">like with North Korea</a>). The only deal the master dealmaker managed to negotiate with the Republican Congress in two years was one to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Getting them to do that is about as hard as convincing your dog to eat a steak; it doesn't exactly take a brilliant negotiator to accomplish.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">There are plenty of criticisms one could make of Nancy Pelosi, and when some Democrats complain about having to deal every election season with a barrage of ads of her face morphing into theirs, they have a legitimate gripe. But as the 2018 election showed, those ads don't really work. The fact that Republicans hate her doesn't mean that other voters will oppose a Democrat just because of her. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-afb36b6f-7fff-edc6-88e9-3b91c711153f">The fact that Pelosi's opponents thought they could take her down with neither an alternative candidate nor a more compelling argument against her shows that they didn't seem to grasp who they were up against. This rebellion isn't over yet, but there's little doubt about which direction it's moving; it looks like Pelosi is going to beat it back using the same skills that made her one of the most effective congressional leaders in decades. As </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1066709483412512768">she herself says</a>, "None of us is indispensable. But some of us are just better at our jobs than others."</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 25 Nov 2018 22:34:33 +0000231582 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDonald Trump Will Never Change His Strategyhttps://prospect.org/article/donald-trump-will-never-change-his-strategy
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1"><span class="dropcap">F</span>ailure is a great teacher, but only if you actually understand you've failed and are willing to admit it. And when it comes to the midterm elections, President Trump admits nothing. Which suggests both that he has learned nothing, and that his 2020 re-election campaign—and everything that comes between now and then—will reflect that vacuum of understanding. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">On Sunday, Fox News aired </span><a href="https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/president-trump-on-divided-congress-mueller-probe-foreign-challenges">an interview</a> Chris Wallace conducted with the president, and the topic of the Democrats' extraordinary midterm victory naturally came up. Trump tried to insist that it had actually been a spectacular victory, not just for Republicans but for him personally. He repeated "I won the Senate" three times, claiming absurdly that the GOP's gain of two Senate seats was "a far greater victory" than taking the House was for Democrats. But confronted with all the ways Democrats won, not just in terms of seats but with key constituencies and in key states, Trump switched gears to insist the election had nothing to do with him. "I didn't run," he said. "I wasn't running. My name wasn't on the ballot."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">This is spin, of course, but I don't think Trump is only spinning his audience. He's also spinning himself. His insecurity and narcissism are so powerful that he can genuinely convince himself that when a Republican wins an election it's only because of him ("I won the Senate"), and when a Republican loses an election he wasn't involved ("I wasn't running").</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">There will be no reflecting, no contemplation, no after-action report. If there were, Trump might ask himself whether the strategy he employed in the last few weeks before the election—one focusing on fear of immigrants—not only didn't work, but backfired. You'll recall that in rally after rally and on a near-daily basis on Twitter, Trump would declare that a caravan of migrants walking slowly through Mexico was a terrifying threat that had to be confronted lest America be overrun by this band of murderers and thugs. He even sent thousands of American troops down to the border as though an army of invasion (a word he often used) were on its way, and not a bunch of people seeking to present themselves lawfully and request asylum.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">But despite the fact that Trump got an assist from the news media, which ran endless coverage of the caravan (and has now almost completely </span><a href="https://apnews.com/38870e6a25d5469292253b4b716ecc17">dropped the subject</a> just as the president has), the strategy failed. If anything, rather than convincing conservative whites to flock to the polls to stop the invading dark-skinned horde, it only reinforced what people don't like about Trump and won more votes for Democrats.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">Trump doesn't see it that way, though—he thinks the election was a success for him. Which is why he'll almost certainly employ the same strategy of fear and hatred when he tries to get reelected in 2020. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span class="pullquote-right"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">Think about it: Can you imagine Donald Trump running a campaign that </span><em>wasn't </em>based on resentment and division? </span>He doesn't do it just because he thinks it works, he also does it because it's a reflection of who he really is and what he really believes.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">Chris Wallace got at this question near the end of his interview with Trump when he played clips of the president lobbing personal insults at female African American reporters (to whom he responds with a particular venom) and told Trump of his conversations with Republicans pained by the president's personal jerkitude. "The one thing they say is, why do you have to be so divisive? Why don't you do more to bring the country together?" Trump responded, "I think that if I was very different, I wouldn't have gotten what we had to get. We got the biggest tax cuts in history, we got ANWR approved."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">You may read that and think it's utterly ludicrous—he wouldn't have been able convince Republicans to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations had he not been so petty, vindictive, and belligerent all the time? But it seems he actually believes it, not because it's some kind of carefully implemented strategy but because it's just who he is. Trump </span><em>is </em>petty, vindictive, and belligerent, and to act in a different way would mean being untrue to himself.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">Furthermore, Trump looks at recent history and says: This is working great. I became president and got some things I wanted over the last few years while everyone was telling me not to be myself, but I was successful because I didn't listen to them. Sure, my party lost the House and lots of downballot races, but that's only because my people couldn't vote for me. Once I'm on the ballot again they'll flock to the polls, provided I give them the hateful rhetoric that makes them cheer.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">It may be a horrific thing for the country and for democracy, but it's probably good for Democrats. Trump can't come up with a better strategy, and he isn't capable of reaching out to those who don't already support him. This—the guy with the 40 percent approval ratings, who motivates his opponents to unheard-of heights of activism and mobilization, who alienates suburban moderates, who can't go a week without getting in a pointless squabble with a celebrity—is all there is. There isn't a more moderate and clever Trump waiting to be unveiled. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">And imagine if the economy takes a downturn between now and then, as it well might. How will Trump respond if he can't even claim that he has brought prosperity to all? Will he reach out to Democrats and find ways to appeal across party lines? Or will he decide with even more conviction that hate and fear are what will save him?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10eb1aa0-7fff-cf37-0a7d-f53bd84397c1">We all know the answer.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 18 Nov 2018 23:38:55 +0000231548 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Midterms Showed that the Real America Is Democratichttps://prospect.org/article/midterms-showed-real-america-democratic
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc"><span class="dropcap">Y</span>ou've heard lots of figures from the 2018 election, but here's what may be the most remarkable one: Once the last couple of House races finish counting, Republicans will have only between 12 and 14 women in their caucus, out of around 200 members. You'll be able to fit all the Republican congresswomen in one van.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">Before the election there were 23 of them, which was nothing to be proud of, but between retirements, defeats, and some running for higher office, the number was slashed almost in half—even as </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/women-congress-governor">a wave</a> of successful Democratic women candidates brings the total number of women in the House over 100 for the first time. Democrats are an even more diverse party, and Republicans are almost entirely represented by white men, a group that makes up 30 percent of the American population.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">That's just one of the ways in which this election moved the two parties apart. They're even more different ideologically than they were before, but perhaps most strikingly, they represent two very different Americas. Or it might be more accurate to say that one party imperfectly represents the whole country, while the other represents only one part of it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">Yet weirdly enough, the media are full of news articles, opinion columns, and debates asking how Democrats can formulate a successful strategy to win over those who don't regularly vote for them or whether they actually need to, while no one seems to be asking a similar set of questions about Republicans. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">Maybe that's because by now the idea that the Republican Party could persuade significant numbers of racial minorities to vote for its candidates is so ridiculous it doesn't even bear discussing. Or maybe they might be able to do so at some point in the future, but they certainly won't be able to as long as their party is led by Donald Trump, who is not only an obvious racist on a personal basis, but also views stoking racial fear and resentment as his clearest path to political success. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">As for the Democrats, the question everyone is posing for them is: <span class="pullquote-right">When they pick a candidate and a strategy for 2020, should they try to appeal to the middle or excite their base?</span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">When it's asked, the responses are predictable: Liberal Democrats say the party needs a liberal, and moderate Democrats say the party needs a moderate. And while both can find individual races and pieces of evidence to support their claim, the liberals have the better of the argument, even if they both have reasonable points to make.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">That's because no on state or district is a microcosm of the whole country. Let's take Senator Claire McCaskill, who lost her re-election race in Missouri by six points. "People need to realize my problem wasn't getting Democrats to vote for me," McCaskill </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/us/politics/democrats-2020-president.html">told <em>The New York Times</em></a>. "I hope that no one thinks that because some of the red-state Democrat moderates lost that means we have to nominate a progressive." The problem with that analysis is that the 2020 Democratic nominee won't be trying to win Missouri—which Trump won in 2016 by 19 points—she'll be trying to win the whole country.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">McCaskill's problem was indeed that there simply weren't enough Democrats in her state to bring her to victory, but that isn't the case everywhere. Take a look at another interesting race, in Georgia's 6th congressional district. You may recall that in 2017, a special election in the district became the </span><a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topraces.php?cycle=2018&amp;display=allcandsout">most expensive</a> House race in history, with a staggering $80 million spent by the candidates and outside groups. Democrat Jon Ossoff, who ran a campaign denuded of partisanship and focused on issues like economic development, lost narrowly to Karen Handel. Last Tuesday, Handel was beaten by <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/8/18072360/lucy-mcbath-georgia-midterm-election-results-karen-handel">Lucy McBath</a>, a African American woman who got involved in politics as a gun regulation advocate after her son was murdered in 2012 by a white man who thought the 17-year-old and his friends were playing their music too loud.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">Handel might reasonably attribute her defeat to Donald Trump, because the Georgia </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressional_district">Sixth District</a>—suburban, increasingly racially diverse, and represented by Republicans for the last 40 years—is precisely the kind of place where the GOP had such trouble this year. Many of the losses the party suffered came because college-educated white women turned away from them in disgust.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">That has helped to change the face of both parties in Congress. As Ron Brownstein </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/08/politics/election-2018-two-americas-brownstein/index.html">notes</a>, the midterms "blew away much of the white-collar wing of the Republican House caucus...It has tilted the remaining caucus more toward the working-class, small town and rural places where President Trump is strongest." That also means that it's even whiter and more male than it was before.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">For the Democrats it's just the opposite: Their voter coalition is a combination of white liberals, African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and members of other minority groups. They're particularly strong in cities and suburbs. And they now have more women in their caucus than ever, including dynamic young women of color like Sharice Davids, Rashida Tlaib, and Jahana Hayes. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">The 2020 election starts now (c'mon, admit it—you're a little bit excited), and though no one candidate can embody every element of a diverse coalition like the Democrats have, the campaign is likely to make the differences between the two parties even more stark. We know what kind of campaign Donald Trump is going to run, and the rest of his party will follow his lead. And even in the unlikely event Democrats make a moderate white guy their presidential nominee, he'll still have to motivate that diverse coalition if he's to have any chance at winning. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-91c1b318-7fff-c6df-0666-e5c877e2abdc">Which means that the 2020 election could do just what the 2018 election did: Make clear how different the two parties are, and move them even farther apart. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 11 Nov 2018 23:21:18 +0000231511 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanRepublicans Undertake Last-Minute Wave of Voter Suppressionhttps://prospect.org/article/republicans-undertake-last-minute-wave-voter-suppression
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<p>People cast their ballots ahead on October 27, 2018, in Marietta, Georgia.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2"><span class="dropcap">I</span>f voting weren't important, it's been said, Republicans wouldn't work so hard to keep people, especially African Americans, from doing it. And with the 2018 midterm elections upon us, they're doing everything they can to put up a few last hurdles in front of those trying to exercise the franchise. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">You can see why they're worried. Democratic enthusiasm is extraordinarily high this year, even among the young, who normally sit out midterms. States, counties, and districts from all over are </span><a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/414750-florida-sees-record-high-early-voting">reporting</a> <a href="https://politics.myajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/early-voting-turnout-reached-new-highs-for-georgia-primary-election/C0sXccV7Qi9yRaofVXMUDN/">record</a> <a href="https://www.wlwt.com/article/hamilton-county-sees-record-early-voting-numbers-for-midterm-election/24612229">turnout</a> in early voting. Instead of the usual turnout of 30 percent or so we see in a midterm, this year it could approach 50 percent, more like a presidential year. Places where Republicans would ordinarily expect to win without expending much effort are competitive for the first time in years.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2"><span class="pullquote-right">Even before they knew that they'd face a backlash against their repellent president, Republicans were using their power to limit whether Democrats could vote and whether their votes would matter.</span> Over the past few years there has been a comprehensive nationwide effort, driven by Republican officials at the state level, to gerrymander districts, require IDs that many people (especially poorer people) don't possess, purge people from the rolls, limit early voting times, and close polling places in minority neighborhoods.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">You may have heard some of the more recent stories. In Dodge City, Kansas, a single polling location serves the city's 27,000 (</span><a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/dodgecitycitykansas">mostly Hispanic</a>) residents, and a local official <a href="https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article220942645.html">recently moved</a> that location out of the center of town to a remote location a mile away from the nearest bus stop. In North Dakota, Republicans passed a law <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/north-dakotas-racist-voter-id-law-is-already-backfiring">requiring</a> that every voter have an ID with a street address, precisely because they knew that many Native Americans who live in remote areas of reservations have no street addresses and get their mail at P.O. boxes. And with the possible exception of North Carolina, there may be no state where African Americans have been targeted more aggressively for vote suppression than Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp is locked in a tight race for governor with Stacey Abrams.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">Kemp is on a </span><a href="https://www.theroot.com/the-wizard-of-voter-suppression-brian-kemp-s-long-hist-1829696413">vote-suppression tear</a>; one wonders if he isn't jealous of the infamy enjoyed by Kris Kobach of Kansas, another secretary of state running for governor as he oversees his own election, as America's foremost vote suppressor. Kemp has aggressively purged voters from the rolls, used an "exact match" system to toss out registrations for minor errors in forms (like a missing hyphen), which put tens of thousands of registrations (<a href="http://time.com/5421332/georgia-brian-kemp-secretary-of-state-53000-voters-governor/">mostly</a> from African Americans) on hold, and watched as country officials limited polling places in African American neighborhoods. And on Sunday, he <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/4/18062034/georgia-governor-race-brian-kemp-hack-democrats">announced</a> that his office was mounting an investigation into the state Democratic Party over a supposed "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">In rather Trumpian fashion, Kemp presented no evidence for this explosive claim. We should note, however, that Georgia is one of the few states that uses electronic voting machines with no paper trail, because Kemp has resisted moving to a more secure system; he even </span><a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/12/637163104/election-security-becomes-a-political-issue-in-georgia-governors-race">rejected</a> federal government offers of assistance in securing the state's computers from hackers.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">With Brian Kemp leading the way, Republicans may never have been more brazen in their attempt to keep Democrats from voting than they are this year. But this is part of a long and concerted effort the GOP has engaged in over the last few years, one that continues to yield dividends. Kemp himself </span><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/brian-kemp-leaked-audio-georgia-voting-745711/">recently said</a> that the turnout operation mounted by Stacey Abrams "is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote," which is a pretty good summation of the Republican perspective. Everybody exercising their right to vote isn't something to celebrate, it's a disaster that must be forestalled.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">You could argue that both parties are jockeying for partisan advantage as they confront this issue, which is true. The difference is that <span class="pullquote-right">Democrats see their advantage in having as many Americans as possible get to the polls, so they want the process to be simple, easy, and open.</span> Republicans, on the other hand, know they'd lose if everyone voted, so they see their advantage in putting up obstacles to registering and voting, throwing people off the rolls whenever they can, and making the process cumbersome, time-consuming, and difficult, at least for Americans who are more likely to vote for Democrats. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">Unfortunately, they've gotten plenty of support from the Supreme Court for suppression measures like voter ID and </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/06/11/supreme-court-delivers-gop-a-victory-in-war-on-voting">purges</a>. And that was while Anthony Kennedy, who occasionally voiced some small bit of concern about disenfranchisement, was on the Court (even though he voted with the other conservatives in 2013 to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act). Now that Kennedy has been replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, a longtime Republican hack, there is almost no doubt that any suppression measure a state passes will be upheld.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">So is there any reason to feel optimistic? Perhaps. One thing we have seen is that the more shameless Republicans are in their attempts to suppress Democratic votes, the more likely there will be a backlash that drives people to the polls. In North Dakota, for instance, tribal officials livid at the attempted suppression of their votes </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/us/politics/north-dakota-voter-id.html">have been</a> providing free IDs to people who don't have them and mobilizing voters.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">In addition, Democratic states have been moving aggressively to pass laws to make voting easier with measures like automatic and same-day registration. This year, Florida voters could overturn the state's felon disenfranchisement law, one of the strictest in the country.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d671cc3-7fff-1c35-2f90-c0048e9909e2">But wherever Republicans are in charge, we can be assured they're going to keep trying to suppress the votes of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, young people, and anyone else not likely to vote for the GOP. If they can't win, they'll try to rig the game.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Nov 2018 10:00:56 +0000231452 at https://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe First Family of Fraudhttps://prospect.org/article/first-family-fraud
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<p>Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr. at a press conference in New York City on January 11, 2017.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5"><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen Donald Trump was wondering what mocking nickname to affix to Hillary Clinton, he quite cleverly settled on "Crooked Hillary," playing off the years of Republican investigations into faux scandals and the widespread sense that she and her husband Bill sometimes danced too close to the ethical line. The most brilliant thing about it was that it managed to muddy the waters about just who the crooked one was. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">"I know you are but what am I" is a common Republican strategy, so it shouldn't have been too surprising. But when we look back now and recall that there was actually a vigorous debate in the media in 2016 about whether not Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton was too corrupt to be president, the mind boggles.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">That's because, as I've argued repeatedly for some time now, even as he ran for president it was obvious that Trump was not simply someone who ignored some inconvenient rules or regularly stretched the truth in his life's work of self-promotion. No, he may well be the single-most corrupt major business figure in America. Not so much because of the scale of his corruption—there are Wall Street bankers who pulled scams with bigger dollar amounts—but because of its variety, its sheer depravity, and the way it was woven into everything Trump did.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">Whether it was scamming struggling people out of their money with </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-university-its-worse-than-you-think">Trump University</a>, lending his name to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/the-trump-network-sought-to-make-people-rich-but-left-behind-disappointment/">pyramid schemes</a>, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/">refusing</a> to pay vendors, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/donald-trump-model-management-illegal-immigration">exploiting</a> foreign workers, using <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/14/nyregion/after-15-years-in-court-workers-lawsuit-against-trump-faces-yet-another-delay.html?pagewanted=all">illegal labor</a>, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910?paginate=false">doing business</a> with the mob, or building properties that for some mysterious reason became the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate">go-to vehicle</a> for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money, Trump's corruption is so comprehensive and widespread that it's difficult to imagine him in his pre-presidential life getting through a single day without pulling a con on somebody.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">And </span>nearly two years into his presidency, we're still learning more about his unethical behavior and, yes, even crimes.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">Let's look at just a couple of recent investigative reports, that in a different time and for a different president might have touched off all-encompassing scandals but today passed by with only the smallest bit of notice.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">As you may know, some time ago Trump moved away from building things and toward licensing his name not only to consumer products (steaks, vodka, ties) but to hotels and resorts built by others, which allowed him to bring in steady income without risking his own capital. As ProPublica </span><a href="https://features.propublica.org/trump-inc-podcast/trump-family-business-panama-city-khafif/">demonstrated</a> in a new analysis, Trump and his children routinely promoted these projects with a series of public lies designed to deceive banks and investors into believing the projects were healthier than they were. Many of them ended up collapsing.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">When a project was in its early stages, Donald, Ivanka, or Donald Jr. would routinely make public claims that most or all of the units in the building had been pre-sold, when those claims were false. For instance, Ivanka </span><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/here-are-the-trump-projects-where-ivanka-and-her-dad-misled-buyers">told reporters</a> in 2008 that 60 percent of the units in Trump Soho were sold, when in fact the number was 15 percent. The project eventually went bankrupt and the Trump name was removed (which has happened to multiple Trump-branded properties). The same pattern was repeated elsewhere: The Trumps would lie in public about the number of units sold and their own investments in the properties, then walk away with their own fees when the whole thing went bust.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">That isn't just vigorous promotion, it's fraud. Investors were deceived into buying into the properties by the Trumps' false statements about their financial soundness. In the case of Trump Soho, there was a real possibility that Ivanka and Donald Jr. would be prosecuted, an outcome that </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-ivanka-trump-and-donald-trump-jr-avoided-a-criminal-indictment">may have been averted</a> by a well-timed donation to the Manhattan district attorney by Donald Trump's lawyer.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">This kind of corruption and even possible criminality is a multi-generational Trump affair. It was only three weeks ago that <em>The New York Times</em> released one of the most extraordinary </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html">investigations</a> of this era, in which they obtained years of tax returns from Fred Trump showing that he and his children—primarily Donald but also his siblings—engaged in a years-long conspiracy to commit tax fraud on an absolutely epic scale—not just taking advantage of loopholes but likely breaking the law, mostly for the purpose of avoiding estate and gift taxes as Fred Trump passed on a fortune of over a billion dollars to his children.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">Donald Trump "and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show," the <em>Times</em> wrote. "Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents' real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings." </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">When the <em>Times</em> story was released, </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/10/03/we-knew-trump-was-incredibly-corrupt-turns-out-he-may-also-be-an-epic-tax-cheat">I spoke</a> to a tax law expert at New York University, who told me that reputable tax attorneys, if asked by a client to participate in the kind of schemes detailed in the records the <em>Times</em> obtained, "they would not only have declined to do it, but they would have wondered if they have a duty to report what's going on" to the authorities. Serious tax lawyers, he said, "are not doing this stuff. They have reputations to protect. They're not interested in going to jail."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">But much of the (all too limited) attention the <em>Times</em> story received was focused on the fact that Trump received a vast fortune from his father, in excess of $400 million in today's money. This directly contradicts the myth Trump had woven about being a self-made man who got rich only through his smarts and drive. "It has not been easy for me," Trump </span><a href="https://youtu.be/TXEOFHf1q9A">said</a> when he was a presidential candidate. "My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars, I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back, I had to pay him back with interest." This was an obvious lie even at the time, but only now do we understand how much of a lie it was.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">But no matter how much of Trump's corruption was revealed in 2016, the myth he had been building for three decades persisted. He managed to convince millions of people that the Trump name is synonymous not just with wealth, in the form of conspicuous consumption of the most </span><a href="https://www.idesignarch.com/inside-donald-and-melania-trumps-manhattan-apartment-mansion/">grotesque</a> sort, but with success itself. If you want a piece of that myth in smellable form, you can get yourself some <a href="https://www.trump.com/merchandise/trump-fragrance/success-by-trump/">Success by Trump</a> cologne ("Success by Trump captures the spirit of the driven man … a masculine combination of rich vetiver, tonka bean, birchwood and musk create a powerful presence throughout wear").</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">And it was indeed a myth. What America elected was not a self-made man who got his wealth through hard work and savvy but a fraudster, the son of a fraudster and the father of fraudsters, as surely as if we had put John Gotti in the Oval Office. The Trumps don't just boast and lie, they appear to have committed actual crimes—and more than a few—however low the chances they'll ever be prosecuted for them. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-b9612f19-7fff-2e05-ba54-f8c43de673c5">That's what we know so far. If enough journalists keep digging—and if the public ever gets to see Trump's tax returns—who knows what other kinds of misconduct will be revealed.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 22 Oct 2018 09:00:49 +0000231340 at https://prospect.orgPaul Waldman